


Tinker, Traitor, Sailor, Spy

by Jamie_Moriarty



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Character Development, Dark, Endgame Lizzington, F/M, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Imposter Reveal, Love/Hate, Mystery, Post-Season/Series 05, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-04
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-05-18 03:30:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 24
Words: 62,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14844839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jamie_Moriarty/pseuds/Jamie_Moriarty
Summary: Allied with her half-sister, Liz vowed to destroy Red but it’s best laid plans when Jennifer deserts the cause and more sleeping giants from Liz’s past awake. Meanwhile the tension between Red and Liz reaches a boiling point as she learns just how fine the line between love and hate really is.





	1. Fast Forward

**Author's Note:**

> The title is inspired by John le Carré's excellent Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A major theme of the novel as well as of our show and of this story is betrayal. This fic will also contain more references to le Carré's work.

“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”   
― John le Carré,  _Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy  _

 

The serenity was eerie but Liz had conducted enough interrogations herself to recognize it as a tactic. She was determined not to let it get to her. So she stared back, her chin jutting forward in defiance.

 

“You hated him.” The voice was a steady monotone, delivering each word with well-spaced precision. “You tried everything to get rid of him. You faked your death, you got yourself kidnapped, took a beating… and it wasn’t enough. You had only one recourse left… you knew of the accident… you had unmitigated access to him… and he wasn’t on his guard around you. After all, he bought it all… hook, line and sinker… the faked death… the kidnapping… the beating… every trick… every lie… he just believed it all. But you didn’t want him to believe…. You wanted him to pay. You wanted him dead. That’s why you poisoned him.”

 

Liz leaned over the table. “It wasn’t me.”

 

“Your fingerprints are on the decanter. Yours and his. Nobody else’s. You had means and opportunity. Not to mention motive. Your own sister testified under oath that you had vowed to destroy him.”

 

“Half sister,” Liz corrected.

 

“You’re an FBI agent, Keen. I know that with all the special treatment and favors you benefited from during your short career, it might not come easy but think like one for a change. I have a suspect who’s been heard making threats in relation to the victim and whose resentment of him is on record. Who had access to the murder weapon….”

 

“He’s not dead,” Liz protested.

 

“Yet!”

 

The word was a sucker punch to the gut. Something had to have betrayed Liz because she saw a knowing flicker in those silver blue depths.

 

“You’re disappointed.” A statement not a question.

 

Liz pursed her lips together tightly in hopes of keeping the quiver of her lower one to herself. She didn’t reply verbally, though.

 

“Monster… lying snake… psychopath… murderer…. They paint a picture, don’t they?”

 

“I was playing a part.”

 

“Every time?”

 

Liz splayed the fingers of one hand on the cool surface of the table. “I didn’t poison him.”

 

“But you have been alone with him often lately… playing nice while plotting to destroy him. The poison was in case that didn’t pan out. Do you want me to read Mr. Zuma’s statement?”

 

Liz’s heart sank. “Dembe thinks I did this?”

 

Sheets of paper tumbled out of the manila folder on the table. “Everyone thinks you did this. Assistant Director Cooper says he doesn’t blame you. Neither does your partner, Agent Ressler, who thinks you snapped after you discovered he was an imposter, that it became too much to bear…. Confess or don’t confess, Keen. Truth be told, I don’t care. I just wanted you to know what you’re up against. You don’t stand a chance with a jury.”

 

“What do you want?”

 

“The exact substance you gave him and the antidote if there’s one. You give me that and you walk out of here right now. A free woman! No charges, no indictment.”

 

“I didn’t poison him.”

 

“Why not? You seem to think he destroyed your life, put you in danger, killed your… let’s call him husband. It’s shorter than threat to national security, to whom you facilitated access to an FBI black site and all confidential documents contained within. Only that he didn’t kill Tom Keen aka Jacob Phelps aka Christopher Hargrave aka two dozen more aliases but then your step-sister claims you’re talking to ghosts so I’m not surprised. You wanted to destroy him. So why is killing him such a leap?”

 

Liz hid a wince at the mentioning of Jennifer. “Because I didn’t do it.”

 

“Alright, then how’s this? I can hold you under the Patriot Act, make sure you disappear into a dark hole for the rest of your miserable life. You have a record of breaking under waterboarding, right?”

 

“I can’t give you what I don’t have.”

 

“You can give me your supplier.”

 

“For a poison I never got? Doubtful!”

 

“Whatever you’ve been giving him has severely aggravated his concussion….”

 

“A concussion I didn’t even know he had,” Liz all but yelled.

 

Silver blue eyes narrowed. “Five million dollars. I have access to untraceable bank accounts earmarked for black ops. I can go as high as ten. Twelve, if I cash in a favor or two. You can’t possibly hate him that much. I’ll even throw in taking your daughter off your hands. You abandoned her with a woman no sane person would trust with their goldfish and never visited. A woman who tried to kill her before she was even born, might I add. I can’t imagine you care about her. We’ll give her to… let’s say, to Mr. Zuma’s daughter. I understand she’s an excellent mother.”

 

Liz sat up straighter scowling. “Leave Agnes out of this. She had nothing to do with it.”

 

“You do care. You’re just unwilling to put in a mother’s work. I can cost you her custody with one phone call. You’ll never see her again.”

 

Something seized painfully in her chest. Their eyes met across the table. “You have the means to rip a child from her mother.” Liz made herself talk as evenly as she could. “It won’t save him, though. I don’t even know what medication could worsen a concussion to this extent.”

 

“Who did you go to for advice?”

 

“Nobody because I didn’t poison him. Why don’t you ask Jennifer, if you two are such friends? She had motive too.”

 

A perfectly-arched, dark brown eyebrow shot up. “No, she didn’t. Besides, we both know Ms. Reddington didn’t do this and we both know why. That’s when you decided he had to die, didn’t you?”

 

There was a pause. Liz glared back without flinching but continue to keep silent.

 

“No? Nothing? Let’s see if a few nights at Guantanamo can change your mind.”

 

The chair scraped against the metal floor and Liz looked up. “Is he… is he gonna die?”

 

The glare she received for her trouble was drenched in a kind of absolute loathing, the likes of which Liz had never seen before. “Get it through your head. He was your only protection. From us. From everyone else. You’re the unwanted daughter of two traitors and whose usefulness vanished the day you let go of the Fulcrum. You’re an aberration. You shouldn’t have existed and I have no compunction about ending it. If he dies, you die.”

 

“Blood tests should show what he’s been given.”

 

“As you already know, the compound is volatile. Its molecules break apart easily. Half of its components are gone from his bloodstream, which makes the whole impossible to identify. It’s the only reason you still draw breath, by the way.”

 

Liz felt the brunt of tears. “It wasn’t me,” she pleaded. “You’re wasting time… _his_ time. You should be out there looking for the real culprit… for an antidote. This is me thinking like an FBI agent.”

 

“I am looking at the real culprit. For you it’s personal. This where the true danger lies, not with a business grudge. Those can be settled.”

 

“I went to talk to him… that last time but I didn’t get around to it. He didn’t seem well. I asked him what was wrong and he joked about needing a drink. I thought he needed a doctor more but I couldn’t just call him one, could I? I poured him that drink. That’s why my prints are on the decanter. I didn’t know how ill he was. I didn’t know….”

 

“Mr. Zuma says you never cared when he was hurt before. That you used his willingness to sacrifice himself for you to your advantage. If you’re going to lie, Agent Keen, you’ll have to do it better. I’m not him! I don’t automatically believe you. Also _I just went there to talk_? How many suspects have you had telling you exactly the same thing, Agent Keen?”

 

“If I knew how to save him, I’d tell you. I swear on my daughter’s life.”

 

“Your daughter would have to mean to you a little more for that to hold any water. Be that as it may, this isn’t kindergarten, regardless of what Assistant Director’s Cooper’s glaring favoritism may have let you to believe. Pinkie swears won’t cut it.”

 

The door slammed shut after that leaving Liz alone. A moment later she was plunged into darkness, probably a preview of what awaited her at Guantanamo. She inhaled deeply and pillowed her head on her arms. In the blackness and silence her heartbeat was truly loud. He was going to die. Those who could help him were not looking for a cure because they were too busy thinking she was hoarding it. She couldn’t blame them. Not entirely. All evidence pointed to her. She had had means, opportunity and motive. Hot rivulets ran down her cheeks. He was going to die. It was a fact as inexorable as the Earth’s rotation which she swore she could feel in the moment. She rubbed at her aching eyes. It was all so surreal. How had they gotten there?

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. Your feedback is much appreciated.


	2. Broken Victory

You all say I've crossed a line,  
But the sad fact is I've lost my mind.

And I'm just getting started, let me offend  
The devil's got nothing on me, my friend  
All I want is to be left alone  
Tact from me is like blood from a stone.

(Keaton Henson - _Beekeeper_ )

 

“Liz… Liz… wake up….”

 

A shooting pain reverberated in her eyes the second she opened them to find the Post Office’s interrogation room filled with a bleary, white light. She blinked and raised her head. There was a crick in her neck but it was quickly forgotten when she lost herself in that familiar, warm, reverent, green gaze. She leaped to her feet and rushed to him, a knee bumping the table as she did. She grasped him by the upper arms, her fingers digging into the soft material of his hoodie, before her arms wound around him pressing him to her, needing to feel him—solid and real—against her.

 

“How…? But…. How…?” She pressed her nose against the skin of his neck and inhaled deeply, taking in his scent, as his arms curved around her torso, holding her securely. She drew back and met his eyes again. “How…?”

 

His lips curved into a luminous smile. “False alarm, Lizzie.”

 

She smiled back. “And you’re alright?”

 

“Good as new. Dembe found an antidote.”

 

Liz frowned. “He thinks I poisoned you.”

 

He chuckled tilting his head to the side a little in that unique, adorable way of his. “Who told you that? Dembe is incapable of thinking ill of you.”

 

Liz shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I just want to go to my daughter, take her in my arms and never let of go.”

 

“Yes, Lizzie. Let’s get Agnes and go home.” He held out his hand to her and she put her fingers into his large, slightly calloused palm.

 

“Liz… Liz, wake up….”

 

A shooting pain reverberated in her eyes the second she opened them to find the Post Office’s interrogation room filled with a bleary, white light. She blinked and raised her head. There was a crick in her neck but it was quickly forgotten when she met Samar’s urgent eyes.

 

“Come on, we don’t have much time,” Samar pressed.

 

“Red… how’s Red?”

 

The look in Samar’s eyes was strange, hard to read. “Critical,” she answered after a pause.

 

“It wasn’t me,” Liz stressed. “You have to look for the real guilty party. They could have an antidote.”

 

Samar was still studying her again in that odd, intense fashion. Then she angled her head towards the door. “I can’t give you the keys. It’ll be easier to believe that you stole my car if you hotwire it. Cooper, Aram, Ressler and I pooled all the money we had on us. It’s in the glove compartment. Take it and go.”

 

“You believe me, right? It wasn’t me. I didn’t poison him.”

 

“Yes, Liz, I believe you.”

 

As she went through the door, it occurred to her that she should have known it was a dream because he never called her Liz.

 

* * *

 

“Do you really think she’ll lead us to her supplier? She’s free. Why not keep running?” Samar asked as they watched on monitors while Liz slipped through the less frequented corridors of the black site towards the secondary exit.

 

Silver blue eyes roved from the screen to Samar. “Because she wants to see him suffer. I’ve had cameras installed in his hospital ward. Maybe she’ll say or do something that will give us a lead on what she used. It’s not much, I admit, but it’s all we have.”

 

They watched Liz leave in silence for a few moments. Samar kept her mouth shut and a tight lead on whirlpool of emotion inside her.

 

“You don’t think she did this, do you, Agent Navabi?”

 

“I don’t know what to think… which may be worse.”

 

Samar turned on a heel and left. She wasn’t stopped. She didn’t get far, though, because she all but tripped on Aram waiting for her in the hallway leading to the security control room. He shot her a dejected look. In response Samar gave him a quick one-armed hug then she stepped back. Aram wasn’t looking much better.

 

“Do you really think Liz did it?” he asked.

 

It was something of a running theme around the Post Office. Samar sighed.

 

“Do you really think she didn’t?” she parried.

 

He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t want to believe she did… but she was really angry when she found out Mr. Reddington was an imposter. She could have.”

 

Samar winced in sympathy. That was the clincher: maybe Liz hadn’t done it but she very well could have.

 

* * *

 

Liz resisted the urge to tap her fingers on the vinyl edge of the table. When the waitress approached her, she pushed a smile to her lips and order coffee and a jelly doughnut. Eating was the last thing on her mind. Her stomach was in knots but she had to act normal, as if she weren’t a fugitive from the law. Again. Her time on the run had taught her as much. Back then she hadn’t been alone, though. She took a sip from her coffee. It was awful. She plied it with sugar and made herself take a bite of the doughnut. She needed her the energy. A minute or so later a woman slipped into the seat across from Liz.

 

“Dr. Fulton… it’s been a while,” Liz said sarcastically.

 

“Agent Keen,” the other woman replied in the same tone. “What can I do for you today?’

 

“Have you ever heard of a chemical that can worsen concussions while rapidly breaking apart injestion?”

 

Fulton’s eyes lit up, all trace of sarcasm evaporating from her countenance. “Akaste. It exists!”

 

“Akaste?”

 

“A nurse from Greek mythology. She was supposed to guard a king’s children but was rather remiss in her duties.” She waves a hand. “It doesn’t matter. Her name means unstable which must’ve been what inspired Hawthorne. The drug was supposed to induce vegetative states. Apparently, they had a miracle one that could cure them but were short on human test subjects for it so they came up with something that would manufacture a few out of concussion patients.”

 

“Hawthorne Biologics?” Liz asked, though she already knew the answer.

 

“Who else?”

 

“You were surprised that it exists,” Liz observed.

 

Fulton nodded and ordered herself tea and asked for a fresh supply of stevia. Once the waitress was gone, she turned her full attention on Liz, a twinkle of excitement glowing in her eyes. “It was supposed to be a myth. Hawthorne initially developed it to check their miracle vegetative state drug but if rumors were to be believe, it wasn’t long before someone saw the potential for extended applications.”

 

“Extended applications?”

 

Fulton’s blonde head bobbed, her features growing more animated. Her hair was shorter than Liz recalled. “If even half of the hearsay about Akaste is real, Hawthorne had a way to turn a run-of-the-mill concussions into neurological disasters with all trace vanishing from the system in record time. That’s not medicine, it’s a weapon and its value on the black market would be astronomical. Besides, with a cure in testing, Akaste becomes the perfect method to blackmail the target’s allies. You must see it’s a lucrative combination.”

 

“How much would it have been worth?”

 

“For the patent holder so to speak, hundreds of millions, a billion maybe. More in the long run. The chemical breaking apart so fast, it’s impossible to get a sample and develop an antidote independently. Akaste is much more valuable as a weapon than its antidote as a cure for vegetative state. After all, there aren’t all that many people in this condition. There are far more people out there looking to commit the perfect murder.”

 

Liz nodded quietly, her mind kicking into hyperdrive. Sirens began to wail distantly. Liz bent and snapped the handcuffs she had taken from Samar’s car on Fulton’s wrist tying her to the leg of the table. The former psychiatrist started to show the first signs of alarm.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Letting you go was a mistake. I’m rectifying it.”

 

“I’ll tell them,” Fulton called out when Liz got up. “I’ll tell them you knew what I was doing and let me go, anyway.”

 

Liz shrugged one shoulder. “Knock yourself out.”

 

* * *

 

Liz snapped the battery into her just-purchased burner and dialed Aram from memory. She turned her head in the direction of the wind, as she waited for him to pick up, the long, brown strands of her hair flying against her face.

 

“Aram, it’s Liz.”

 

“Hey… where…. I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk right now.”

 

She stifled a sigh. “I can’t imagine better times may be coming. I need you to look up something for me… and Red. Can you pull up the list of items recovered during the investigation into Natalie Luca?”

 

“The Luschen disease carrier?”

 

There was something worrisome in Aram’s lowered voice but Liz lacked the time to pursue it just then. Red wasn’t faring much better time wise, either. Any second that ticked by brought him closer to certain death.

 

“Yeah. See if there’s anything in the research we confiscated from Hawthorne Biologics on a drug named Akaste. I think that’s what was used to poison… Red. There might be an antidote.”

 

“Hold on a second….”

 

Liz closed her eyes, pushing a lock of hair behind her right ear. She huddled on the park bench she occupied, trying to make herself as unobtrusive as possible. Her heart was hammering in her chest.

 

“Please… please,” she murmured under her breath, not daring to address a God she hadn’t spoken to in too long. It could be easy, though. They could have had the cure all the while. All the had to do then was give it to him.

 

“CDS found mentioning of it in the documentation from Hawthorne Biologics but they’re not clear on what it represents,” Aram told her.

 

Of course it couldn’t be that easy!

 

“They must’ve had the structure of the drug somewhere,” Liz countered. “Samples and paperwork on the antidote. A record of testing either Akaste or the cure, if not both. Even if that testing was illegal, they still needed to keep track of the results.”

 

“If they did, then maybe they destroyed it before we had a chance to execute our search warrant. There’s nothing here, Liz.”

 

“Tell them. Tell Samar, Ressler, anyone…. There’s still time to turn what’s left of Hawthorne upside down. Maybe they’ll come across something to give the doctors a head-start at least.”

 

“Liz, they’re bringing in Dr. Sharon Fulton.”

 

“I know. Listen, Aram, I have to go. I’ll call you if I get anything else.”

 

Aram said something that sound a lot like a warning but she ended the call and pushed it out of her mind. She needed to focus. She needed to find a way to go from there. If it had been her who was helpless in that hospital bed, he would move heaven and earth to save her, lay siege to hell and coerce an answer out of the Devil herself. She couldn’t do anything less. And she desperately needed to think. Why had he led them to Natalie Luca and Hawthorne Biologics? It had been right before Kate Kaplan’s attack escalated. Back then it had been inconceivable to concentrate on anything else. Afterwards the suitcase had been on the loose and everything veered out of control again. No, she was missing something. She needed to think like him.

 

“If Fulton knew about the drug, so did you,” she muttered. “Only you’re you. You would’ve known more. You would’ve had concrete details. You most likely would’ve known where to look for it.”

 

The shadow of an old doubt whispered poisonously that sometime in the confusion caused by the Natalie Luca debacle, he could have stolen the data on Akaste and its cure from Hawthorne or maybe even taken them from the Bureau’s own archive to use them as a weapon. It could be worth a billion, after all. Liz squashed the notion with a shake of her head. Apparently, both of the drugs still needed testing and for him to test what amounted to poison on human beings, no, he wouldn’t have done it. She was learning. She hadn’t learned fast enough before but she was learning now. He wouldn’t have tested it on someone else….

 

“He would’ve taken it himself,” she realized.

 

Her head was spinning. He wouldn’t have had time after they had stopped Natalie Luca because of Kaplan’s attack but he would have seen an opportunity in the concussion caused by his and Dembe’s car accident. But why? No, that was the wrong question. Where was the antidote? That was the correct question. Dembe suspected she had been the one to poison him so he knew nothing. Probably because he would have tried to stop him, if he did. Anyone remotely sane would have. If Dembe didn’t know, then nobody else did. He had done all this by himself taking the risk of being unable to use the antidote in time, which was what had most likely happened. Liz felt like tearing off all of her hair. Oh but he was the most exasperating man on earth! Who voluntarily poisoned himself while desperately fighting to keep the fact that he was an imposter a secret?

 

Dembe took a long while to answer.

 

“Dembe, don’t hang up please. It’s Elizabeth.”

 

“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said in a low, carefully measured voice.

 

“I know what he took.”

 

“Of course you do.”

 

Liz fought a sigh. “It wasn’t me! He took it himself. It’s a drug called Akaste. It induces vegetative states. I think he stole it from Hawthorne Biologics. Apparently they were also developing a cure.”

 

There was a long pregnant pause on the other end. Liz felt the preciously few final reserves of her sanity draining away. “You know why he did it, don’t you?” she said. She received no reply. “Anyhow, it doesn’t matter. I need your help looking for the antidote.”

 

“Have you warned the authorities as well?”

 

“No, you’re the only person I can think of that I can convince he’s crazy enough to do it.”

 

“You’ll take his apartment in Bethesda and Frederick Hemstead’s place in Baltimore. I’ll go out of the country. He still has a few untouched safe deposit boxes overseas.”

 

“Do you still have access to his plane?”

 

“I’ll manage.”

 

“Are you at the hospital right now?”

 

“Yes,” he responded warily.

 

“Tell him I know he has unfinished business with me. And that he can’t get to it if he’s dead.”

 

“Elizabeth, if he lives, you’ll never see him again.”

 

* * *

 

Sitting cross-legged in the middle of utter mess she had made of the living room of Red’s apartment in Bethesda, Liz lifted her gaze to the creature perched atop the upturned couch.

 

“Would you stop spitting at me? I’m trying to save your owner.”

 

His cat hissed at her again with even more venom than before.

 

“What did he tell you about me?”

 

Liz ran a hand through her hair, her fingers stopping when they encountered a few particularly stubborn knots. She had just wasted three hours of his time for nothing. It wasn’t there. She got up and went to Baltimore.

 

* * *

 

The light breaking through the foliage rich trees outside the window was indeed beautiful. As beautiful as she remembered from when they had sat on the sofa in silence sharing the unpublished and unappreciated writer’s turpentine-tasting drink. She sat down in the exact spot she had occupied back then. A lifetime go. An eternity. She did feel like howling at the moon. She also felt like wailing. Like collapsing to the floor screaming atop of her lungs. Begging for a second chance. For all the wasted time to be returned to them, for her and his mistakes to be reversed. But at least, it was there. It was there on the coffee table, the rays spilling from outside breaking against it and transforming into myriads of tiny rainbows. An eight-inches or so glass statuette of Winged Victory from Louvre. There was something inside it, too.

 

Liz grabbed the small statue and smashed it on the edge of the table. It broke and the shards scattered to the floor. Out of it fell an elongated yet narrow silvery case. Liz popped it open. It contained a vial of dark yellow fluid. She felt instantly devoid, as if her insides had just liquefied and left her, opened and exposed to that beautiful, beautiful light that broke through the trees outside. She squeezed her fist around the case, holding it safely in the palm of her trembling hand. The sirens were howling in the street below. Liz scurried out the door already aware of what was awaiting her. She wasn’t sure whether Dembe had called them or if they had been after her all along. It didn’t particularly matter, either.

 

She was surrounded, weapons trained on her from the encirclement of police cars and black SUVs. She dropped to her knees on the unforgiving pavement, her hands where they could see them, her right one holding up the priceless medicine case like an offering.

 


	3. Old Friend

 

 _Hello darkness, my old friend._  
I've come to talk with you again  
Because a vision softly creeping  
Left its seeds while I was sleeping  
And the vision that was planted in my brain  
Still remains  
Within the sound of silence.

(Disturbed – _Sound of Silence_ )

 

“Hands on your head… do it now!”

 

“I have the antidote,” Liz yelled desperately holding out the case with her right hand, while she had put her left one atop her head as instructed. “Arrest me but… just give it to him. He’s running out of time.”

 

A pair of blue eyes were staring at Liz over the barrel of a SIG-Sauer P320 trained on her. She saw her own death in them. She grasped the medicine case tighter between her fingers.

 

“Please… it’s real. Just get it to him in time!”

 

“Sir,” Ressler piped in, looking at Liz in concern. “Agent Keen is not armed. She’s surrendering.”

 

A curt nod and agents in black gear, obviously not FBI, closed in on Liz still on her knees on the sidewalk. Samar and Ressler hurried in her direction as well. Samar’s stormy brown eyes were full of doubt but she took the case from Liz.

 

“Talk to Dembe,” Liz urged Samar and Ressler as she was unceremoniously dragged to her feet. She didn’t resist. The cuffs bit into her wrist with more force than necessary. “Tell him I found it,” she went on while she was being pushed towards one of the black SUVs. It was perhaps the last time she was seeing her colleagues. “Dembe has medical power of attorney. He’ll give it to him…. I’m sorry,” she called. She was in the process of being shoved into a backseat. “For the faked death, for all the lies, for taking your for granted and letting you down in the end…. Tell Aram….” She didn’t get a chance to finish. A hand pressed roughly between her shoulder blades and she found herself face first against the seat before a black hood was forced over her head and the car drove away with a loud screech of tires.

 

* * *

 

It took her eyes a few minuted to adjust to the pitch blackness. She knew from experience one accustomed oneself to darkness far too easily and forgot to seek the light again. She had no idea where she was, though she estimated they had driven for about six or seven hours. She had been led down a long, poorly corridor to a minuscule room where she had been directed to strip under the watchful glare of a visibly armed female guard and made to dress into a dark gray prison jumpsuit. Then the corridor then there. She had gotten a glimpse of her cell: tiny, with cement-colored walls, a narrow cot bolted to the floor and a metallic toilet bowl and matching sink in one corner. The door had been closed with deliberate slowness the pale neon light dwindling gradually till it disappeared completely. Liz knew where she was: where rights ended and the discretionary powers of military and intelligence began. It had cracked down on her before. Back then it had been an injustice and she had felt it acutely. Now, however, she didn’t rebel. In fact, all fight had leeched out of her.

 

For the first time in many year, maybe in her entire life, she was not angry. A calm so profound it felt alien washed over her. She felt with her palms for the blanket she had noted at the foot of the bed and pulled it over her body. The blanket was scratchy but thick. It would serve well in the cold of the cell. She closed her eyes. Leaving them open was useless, anyway.

 

She trusted Samar. She would get the antidote in time to Dembe and Dembe would save him. Dembe was a man of unfaltering devotion. Red would recover and see to Agnes just like he had when Liz had been in a coma for ten months. Probably he would find her a loving family that could provide for her daughter in ways she never could. Not so much financially but emotionally. She had had to give her when she had first had the opportunity before the child had been born. But she had been selfish. She had wanted to know her. Above all, she had expected that her little, delicate child to rewrite not only her mostly unknown past but also her present and future. Her delusion had only worsened with the trauma of losing everything and being forced on the run. Real or not, she had wanted back everything she had had before she had discovered everything about her, including her own name, was a lie. And Tom, who was not real himself, had promised she could have it all back, even his role of as a doe-eyed school teacher who had never existed. A fake husband for a made-up marriage. She had not been as deluded by him as she had wanted to delude herself. She had wanted the fantasy, forgetting the most basic thing about fantasies: they were not real. Only Agnes was real. She had always been real and caught in the crossfires of her and Tom’s bad choices. Just like Masha had been caught in the crossfires of Katarina Rostova and Raymond Reddington’s bad choices. That was the fundamental lesson she had to learn from her mother’s self-inflicted tragedy: that the history had to be prevented from repeating itself with Agnes. Liz had not learned that lesson fast enough. But she was learning now.

 

She might not be able to undo all the harm she had caused but there was hope for Agnes. And Red would live. And her always taken for granted Post Office family was safe. And she was no longer furious. She had lost everything again. She had even lost sunlight. It was horrible but it was real. She curled in a fetal position, her mind trembling with the weight of memories. Sam’s calling her _butterball_. A soft, soft lullaby she couldn’t remember the lyrics to but that she had a feeling it had been sung to her by her mother. The way Red’s eyes used to light up at the sight of her, his voice like a caress when calling her Lizzie. The first time she had held Agnes in her arms. A voice like slowly melting caramel whispering in the dark like a guiding light calling her to the surface.

 

_Out of the night that covers me_

_Black as the pit from pole to pole_

_I thank whatever gods may be_

_For my unconquerable soul._

 

* * *

_Six Months Earlier_

 

Liz was so angry, her blood was singing with it. She was vibrating with fury as she left the cemetery where Tom had been buried with a stranger by her side, a stranger who was her half, until recently wholly unknown sister. Her left eye hurt. The entire side of her face hurt, for that matter, down to the teeth and gums in her mouth. Needles and pins poked relentlessly at various points of her battered body. There was faint ringing in one of her ears and she was fighting off mild nausea. It was nothing compared to the pain radiating from the center of her being. That one and the rage felt eviscerating.

It was worse than when he had killed Sam. This impersonator, interloper, this destroyer who had inserted himself in her life, killed her foster parent, assigned Tom to her only to try to tear him from her by any means necessary, destroying her family, and finally had had the gall to pretend to be her father. Her father whose identity he had stolen while he had carelessly shoved him in an old suitcase. The indignity. The manipulation. The lies. She was suffocating, she was so angry. She dug her boots into the ground, practically stomping as she went. This stranger who had pretended to care about her while tricking her all the while. Anything between them worse than a lie; it had been a figment of her imagination. It burned, the betrayal, it did, and she wanted to tear him limb for limb for it. But she had an in: she had slipped underneath his skin when he wasn’t looking. And Liz had learnt from the master when it came to using one’s love to rip their heart out of their chest… figuratively and literally, if need be. She would borrow a page from Tom’s book, every page from his book, in fact, and make the stranger pay for all the sorrow and wrath boiling inside of her.

 

“Hey… where did you go?” Jennifer cautioned. She was looking at Liz quizzically. “You seemed miles away just now.”

 

Liz shrugged. “The meds are making me woozy,” she lied. “What were you saying?”

 

“So who do you think he is? The importer.”

 

Liz stopped and looked around them. “Not here.”

 

“But where?”

 

Liz gestured to a pastry shop across the street that she deemed quiet enough for them to talk. When they went in, Jennifer automatically moved to sit at a free table by the door. Liz shook her head and immediately regretted it. Her cheeks twinged painfully.

 

“Not there,” she corrected. “Always pick a corner table that gives you a good view of the front door and a possible escape route.”

 

Jennifer shot her a confused look but went with her to a corner table from where they could see both the front door and the bathroom access, which could be a secondary escape. Nobody but the waiter who asked for their order came for them, though. Jennifer made to wave him off but Liz stopped her and ordered them both coffee.

 

“Always order something,” Liz instructed further. “Act normal.”

 

Jennifer cast a surreptitious look around that was so obvious it was the polar opposite of Liz’s last suggestion. Her inexperience betrayed her at every step.

 

“I have no idea who he is,” Liz ground out. The words hurt to get out, her fury spiking to the point it was blinding. Her statement worked, though. It attracted Jennifer’s attention back to her. “But whoever he is, he’s dangerous and he has decades of experience playing this game. He’ll see us coming a mile away. That’s why we need to be careful. More careful than any of us has ever been in her life. And above all, we need to formulate a plan.” The last thing her pounding head wanted to do was think but she had no choice. “But first we have to put you somewhere where he wouldn’t find you.”

 

Jennifer’s face fell. “Even as my pretend father, I still have to hide from him.”

 

“Welcome to life in his shadow. Don’t try faking your death. It slows him down somewhat but it doesn’t work in the long run. Believe me, I tried. My colleagues and I can’t put you in a safe house in FBI custody. He has eyes and ears everywhere. He’ll find you. You should lay low for a while. Go to a motel room somewhere in the greater DC area. Don’t tell anyone but me where you are. We’ll have to buy you a burner. Keep it on your at all time. Now about your car….”

 

“What’s wrong with it?”

 

“He may know about it. You have to get rid of it. Get something from Craig’s list and pay for it in cash. He has the best trackers in the world looking for you. If you leave a trace somewhere, no matter how small, he’ll use it to find you.”

 

“He hasn’t found me for over twenty years,” Jennifer pointed out.

 

“He hasn’t had a reason to look for you. If he has the smallest reason to suspect you know his secret, he’ll come for you. Trust me on that.”

 

* * *

 

Jennifer drove her new and ratty Ford to a motel off the highway just outside Alexandria. She got a room and paid for it through the week. The parking lot was quiet as she crossed it. She looked behind her a few times, just as she had checked her rear view mirror on the way there, but she didn’t appeared to have been followed. As she was closing the door to her pine-scented cleaner smelling bedroom, she wondered if there ever would be a time in her life when she wouldn’t have to run and hide. The door clicked shut. She raised her eyes just as she was dropping her duffel bag to the floor. It landed with a hushed thud. She saw the dark silhouette against the drawn shutters. She opened her mouth to scream and scrambled backwards, her right hand making a mad dash for the knob that slipped through her fingers. She hadn’t seen the man moving in on her from her left only felt the hand coming over her mouth. It was encased in black leather and smelled as such with just a hint of pungent smoke thrown in the mix. Her heart stuttered in her chest. She heard a rich, honeyed baritone speaking directly in her ear, hot breath tickling her skin.

 

“I’m sorry, Jennifer, but it’s best if we avoid a public scene.”

 

She attempted to struggle but an arm as unmoved as a vice caught her waist, holding her firmly in place, trapped between the door at her back and the warm body at her side. She swallowed a whimper, her blood turning to ice in her veins. She was going to die, she just knew it. Killed on the stained carpet of a grotty motel room by the man who had stolen her father’s identify. The dark silhouette from the window moved closer. She tried to writhe her way to freedom again and even pushed a foot back to kick her captor but it only hit the wall, sending a tendril of pain up her ankle from the harsh impact. She felt a prickle on the side of her neck. She tried to turn her head and see what he was doing to her but the hand over her mouth wouldn’t let her. Her head began to swim mere seconds later. Warmth radiated from her fingers and toes until it bloomed in her chest. She was briefly dizzy, her fear strangely abated. It occurred to her she had been drugged. Then she started to fall. As she was slipping into darkness, she knew the hold on her had loosened and she slinking to the floor, but the same strong arms caught her. She was being lifted but her vision had become too blurry for her to realize exactly what was going on. Her body seemed to be floated yet it was anchored, her temple supported against a material that was slightly raspy and smelled like warm spice and fresh rain. Her last thought before the blackness set in entirely was that she was in the arms of her soon-to-be killer.

 

 


	4. The Other Reddington Girl

 

 

_Six months ago_

 

Jennifer woke up groggy and back in time. She rubbed at her eyes and looked around. If it was a dream, it was a most surreal one. The cabin was unchanged. Nothing seemed to be out of place from the last time she had seen it decades before, when she had been only a child. She felt tempted to touch her face to check if she wasn’t by some weird chance still seven or eight and the reminder of her childhood as well as her adulthood had been nothing but a nightmare. She blinked. The illusion failed to waver. She got up unsteadily from a bed she knew well. She fitted it now but the last time she had been here, it had been far too big for her. The last time she had been here she had worn pink pajamas to bed and slept with a Strawberry Shortcake doll. The toy was nowhere to be seen and she was still dressed in the same clothes she had worn at the cemetery with her half sister. The rest came back in a lurch. She stomach roiled unpleasantly. She had been kidnapped by the man masquerading as her father. Her father whom she had feared and hated for years but who was, in effect, dead, killed perhaps by the imposter. She sprang up causing the room to whirl around her. She dropped to her knees on the carpet dragging the comforter that had been folded over her along for the ride. She ended up on all fours on the floor heaving.

 

“Jennifer… oh, honey….”

 

The voice echoed across Jennifer’s frayed senses, strumming something that lay down deep at the bottom of her memory well. She frowned trying to focus through the bout of nausea overwhelming her. Slender yet strong fingers wrapped around her upper arms and pulled her to her feet. Swallowing over the bile rising in her throat, Jennifer lifted her weary gaze and found it resting on her mother’s familiar face. The scream lodged itself in her throat but did not make its way out. Not entirely. She jerked back, rekindling her sickness. The back of her feet hit the bed and she fell backwards.

 

“No,” she murmured weakly.

 

“It’s alright, Jenny,” the apparition assured with a smile. “It’s me. It really is me!”

 

“That’s not possible,” Jennifer croaked.

 

The woman who wore her mother’s face drew closer and reached out to her but Jennifer shook her head. “Don’t be scared. I wish there had been some way I could’ve let you know sooner.” She sat down on her bed next to Jennifer, grabbed of her trembling, clammy hands and squeezed between her fingers.

 

Jennifer straightened herself up the best she could. “How…? I don’t understand. Frank said you were dead. That you had been shot.”

 

Her mother looked away. “As far as he knows, I am dead, Jenny.”

 

“As far as he knows….” Jennifer blinked. “As far as he knows? What about me, Mom? What about your daughter?” She jumped to her feet ignoring her lingering queasiness. “I stood over your grave sobbing, mourning my poor mother who had been dealt such a horrible hand in life only to die gunned down pointlessly by some unknown assailant.”

 

Carla Reddington stared at her attentively. “You have to understand, Jenny, Frank and I were in hiding. We couldn’t just get a divorce. I couldn’t go to court. I would’ve been tied to that lying, cheating bastard for the rest of my life. I had once again married a man I thought honest and good only for him to sleep with another women in our own marital bed. In our own bed! I couldn’t take it. Not again! So I took the only option left to me.”

 

“Traumatizing your daughter for life?” Jennifer quipped dryly. “Why didn’t you say something?”

 

Her mother pulled to her feet slowly. “I was going to. I swear to you, Jenny.”

 

“Don’t call me that!”

 

“It wouldn’t have been safe to reach out to you before but once I was settled, I wouldn’t come for you. I promise you I would’ve!”

 

Jennifer stepped back. “All this time I thought you were only looking out for me. That you were the parent who never abandoned me without a word. What you’ve done is so much worse than what I thought Dad did. Can’t you see that?

 

Carla reached out a hand to touch her again but Jennifer sidestepped it. “I’m sorry, honey, I truly am. But it was the only way. I couldn’t risk your safety. Not until I could secure a new identity for the both of us.”

 

Jennifer felt the distinctive trail of hot tears run down her cheeks. “You left me all alone,” she accused. “Did you know Ian’s dead? That father has been dead all along. That he never abandoned us.”

 

Her mother scowled. “Yes, he did. He abandoned us long before he went missing. Look around you, Jenny. Remember all those wonderful weekends we spent in this place, just the three of us. Well, he spat on all of them. He spat on our family, on our lives… when he brought his mistress here. One weekend here with us.” A tear trembled down her mother’s left cheek. “The other with her. It doesn’t matter if he was dead this whole time. Everything I told you about him is true. He really was a bad man. He was selfish. He threw away our family for kicks. I was suspected of treason because of him. They came for us in the middle of the night. Don’t you remember? We had to move, disappear, you had to leave your house, your school, your friends.”

 

“And you faked your death and ran away from me. You’re both terrible people. Selfish, too. You never cared about me. All you ever cared about was yourselves. Tell me, did you work with the man impersonating your ex-husband to skimp out on your current one?”

 

Carla blanched. Somehow Jennifer had hit a nerve. “No,” she murmured soberly then added with more determination. “No. He… he’s just a lot less trusting than Frank… and you. He opened my grave and ran tests on the body of Jane Doe I had buried in my place. Once he realized what I had done, he came looking for me.”

 

Jennifer sneered. “Good for him!”

 

Her mother once again tried to touch her. “Jenny, I would’ve come for you, anyway. When the time was right….”

 

“He had to drag you here? What kind of mother are you? What kind of people are my own two

parents?” She sniffled, as tears threatened to fall again. “I can’t believe I have your genes! Well, Mom, you can go back to your afterlife. You needn’t have bothered coming. As you can see, I’m just fine without you.”

 

Her mother grasped one of her wrist. “Jenny….”

 

Jennifer shrugged free glaring at her mother. “Jenny was a little girl with pink pajamas in a pink bedroom living in a perfectly pink world that never existed. I’m 35-years old, in case you haven’t noticed. I don’t need my Mommy anymore!”

 

With that she turned around briskly and dashed out of the cabin, leaving behind childhood books and toys she had long thought lost. Her mother was right about one thing: her family had indeed spent lovely, solar days at that cabin. Just like everything else in her life, however, those memories were largely found on an illusion.Tears blurred her vision as her heart hammered in her chest. Her emotions were running rampant menacing to choke her. She collided with something solid that put an abrupt end to her sprint. She felt herself start to slide to the ground but her descent was halted by a firm hand high on her right arm. She looked and found herself face-to-face with the man impersonating her father.

 

Gawking at him now, Jennifer wondered how she didn’t realize this man was a complete stranger. His eyes… they might seem blue in a certain light but they were definitely green. Her father had had blue eyes, an exact match for those of Jennifer’s step-sister.

 

“Jennifer… are you alright?” he said in that low, rumbling voice of his, studying her not without concern.

 

The stranger’s eyes reminded Jennifer of an old werewolf movie she had seen. There was something almost supernatural in that luminous emerald eyes. She would bet good money he could use them to hypnotize people.

 

She continued to weep softly and didn’t answer his query. It didn’t occur to her that not so long ago she had been planning to destroy this man, this man who could be dangerous and might mean her harm. Her head was too busy swimming with everything she had learnt about her parents.

 

“Here,” the stranger said and held out a crisply white handkerchief to her.

 

Jennifer snatched it without a word and dabbed at her eyes with it before blowing her nose loudly. “Luke Skywalker didn’t know how easy he had it,” she mumbled after a while.

 

He seemed confused then his eyes lit up briefly after which he frowned. “Oh, the character from Star Wars.”

 

“Not a fan?” she asked.

 

Why not discuss Star Wars with the man pretending to be her father? Apparently that was her life now. Things couldn’t possibly get more surreal.

 

“I find it implausible,” he replied.

 

“More implausible than this?” she inquired gesturing to her surroundings.

 

He chuckled, the sound a warm, thick rumble emerging from his wide chest. “I suppose you’re right.”

 

“Are you gonna kill me?”

 

His expression soured. “Of course not,” he said indignantly.

 

“If you were me, you’d wanna know,” she pointed out. “Get it out of the way.”

 

“Fair enough,” he conceded, examining her closely with those intense green eyes of his. “But just because I wouldn’t hurt you, Jennifer, it doesn’t mean others wouldn’t. You’re not safe!”

 

“Story of my life,” she grumbled.

 

“The best thing for you right now would be to leave with your mother. I can offer you new identities in a place of your choosing. I know it may not seem so at the moment, but I can keep you safe. I can make you disappear. For good, this time.”

 

Jennifer scoffed. “Story of my life, part two,” she went on. “I dropped out of college after my mother told me she was leaving me for my own sake. I’ve never been in an actual. I never made any friends. I never lived.” She locked eyes with him and took a step closer, their bodies all but brushing. “Can you even begin to imagine what that is like?”

 

“Yes.”

 

The word seemed to have been wretched from the depths of his being, gruff and fierce as it sounded. She believed him.

 

“I don’t care if I live for a day, a month or ten years. I just want to live. I want to go back to school, make a friend, date…. I don’t want to run and hide anymore.”

 

“So you want to live even if it kills you?” The left corner of his mouth tilted upwards sardonically, as he inclined his head to the side, his glinting eyes considering her carefully, as if for the first time.

 

She scoffed. “I didn’t say it was a perfect plan.”

 

He took a measured step back, the uncertainty washing off his face to be replaced with an impeccably schooled masked. She wondered how he was doing that.

 

“I think you should go back and talk to your mother,” he said coolly, suddenly seeming miles away. “You were right when you told me she only had your best interests in mind. She may have made a few mistakes but don’t all parents do that? It’s not exactly easy….”

 

“Really? All parents fake their deaths without so much as a “hey, kid, I’m not dead, stop crying your eyes out” message?”

 

“Circumstances were complicated given that you were in hiding. Besides, her husband hurt her deeply.”

 

“Which one of them?”

 

“Both,” he admitted, his voice once again taking on that profound quality.

 

“Did you know my father?”

 

“Yes.”

 

Jennifer narrowed her eyes, still holding his handkerchief in one hand. “Who are you?”

 

“Jennifer, you already have enough problems without adding knowing my true identity to them.”

 

“I have to call you something and I’m not calling you Raymond.”

 

“Two different men can have identical names. Not all the John Smiths of this world are one and the same. However, you shouldn’t worry about what to call me since this is probably the last time we’ll see each other.”

 

“Jenny,” resounded loudly in her mother’s pitch from the direction of the cabin. “Jenny… Jennifer!”

 

Jennifer checked the periphery of her vision. She had run without looking where she was going but apparently she had stumbled across a place where trees obscured her from the cabin. She glanced to the man before her and shook her head no to him.

 

“You can’t avoid her forever,” he mouthed.

 

She pleaded with him with her eyes. Whoever he was and whatever her future held, she just couldn’t face her mother right now. She needed a break from both her parents, dead, alive or just pretending to be dead as they were. The stranger gave her one long, pondering look then grasped her wrist in a secure hold. She felt callouses as his skin brushed against the back of her hand. He led her across the leaves strewn grass and through the trees past the clearing and to a massive, black Mercedes parked right at the head of the trail leading down to the highway. She followed in silence, opting to let her mind go blank. It was insane what she doing and Jennifer knew it but she was tired of trudging along the pathway set forth for her by the consequences of her parents’ ill-conceived actions.

 

He nodded to the black man who almost seemed to accompany him then grabbed his black fedora off the hood of the car, put it on and got into the driver’s seat. He gestured Jennifer to get in as well, as he did so. She took the seat next to him and fastened her seatbelt. He revved the engine and pulled out a flip phone of all things.

 

“Hello, Justin, could you please pass the phone to the lady you’re guarding? Taking a safe distance from her afterwards might be advisable too…. Carla, there’s no need to worry. Jennifer’s with me…. I resent that! I only kidnapped Jennifer once and that was at your behest.” He paused, made a non-committal sound in the back of his throat then handed the phone to Jennifer. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

 

Jennifer took the cell, opened her window and flung out the device. “I’ll buy you a replacement,” she told him.

 

“That won’t be necessary. Where do you want to go, anyway?”

 

“Away,” she muttered, rested her head against the back of her seat and closed her eyes.

 

“You can’t go back to the life Ian Garvey set for you.”

 

“I know.” She rolled her head towards him and opened her eyes anew. “Why are you doing this for me?”

 

He was staring ahead of the road, his expression inscrutable. “I know what it’s like to stand over the grave of a loved one while they’re not actually there.”

 

“We’ve never actually met before now, have we?”

 

“I’ve seen a picture of you as a child, but no, we’ve never met in person before.”

 

She held out her hand to him. “Jennifer Reddington. Pleased to meet you.”

 

He glanced at her momentarily, surprise written across his features. “Kenneth Rathers. And the pleasure’s all mine, Jennifer.”

 

“Is Kenneth Rathers your real name?”

 

“It’s a name,” he said vaguely.

 

“And what’s in a name?” she replied.

 

He laughed. The sound was rich and syrupy.


	5. What Was and What Should Never Be

_Now_

 

Jennifer strutted into the ward with a confidence she didn’t truly feel.

 

“Hey stranger,” she said with a grin and set down the giant bouquet of red roses she had brought in on the nightstand. Then getting an idea, she leaned over him and whispered in his ear. “Don’t go towards the light.” She drew back and eyed him critically. “That’s from _House_. Not that you’d know anything about it.” She took a seat by his bed, crossed and uncrossed her legs then shifted in her seat uncomfortably. After a minute or so she threw her hands up in defeat. “I don’t know….” She worried at the insides of her cheek with her tongue. “I have no idea what so say. I’m sorry for what my father did to you? I’m sorry my mother punched you in the face? I’m sorry my sister poisoned you? That she broke your heart and royally screwed you over before that? You gotta admit, my family really knows how to add insult to injury.” A sigh hefted its way out of her chest. “If it helps, I testified against her and I’m gonna keep doing it till she’s put away for good. Though you’d probably try to save her if you were awake. That’s the irony, isn’t it? She tried to kill the one person sticking it out for her. What can you do? Love sucks and you’re not waking up.” She began rooting through her purse. “I brought something to read to you. It’s what I saw people in movies do in situations like this. Let’s hope it’s not all made up. Edgar Allan Poe… it’s the fanciest thing I had at my place. Somehow I don’t think you’d appreciate the potboilers I like to read.”

 

She flipped through the pages unsure of where she was headed. Then she began to read at random.

 

 _From childhood's hour I have not been_  
As others were; I have not seen  
As others saw; I could not bring  
My passions from a common spring.  
From the same source I have not taken  
My sorrow; I could not awaken  
My heart to joy at the same tone;  
And all I loved, I loved alone. 

 

Jennifer snapped the book shut again. “You see,” she started. “That’s why I read crap. Crap’s not depressing.” She smiled sadly. “I have to wonder… what you must be thinking…. Can you even hear us? Do you know I’m here? Do you know Dembe’s here? I don’t believe he ever left.” She leaned closer to him. “Where are you? Can you find your way back?”

 

* * *

 

_April 1988_

 

“Carla… Carla….” The young man called the name of the woman strutting a few feet from him twice again before he finally managed to get her attention.

 

She turned and the wind ruffled a few strands of her dark hair in her face. He knew instantly something was amiss. She was wearing lipstick but the peach shade didn’t match her powder blue skirt suit and her teal shirt wasn’t pressed. Her slightly puffy eyes were devoid of any make-up. She had spent the night before crying or not getting enough sleep. She ducked his head, allowing a wisp or two of his honey brown hair to topple to his forehead and gave her his best nonchalant grin. She responded only tentatively while she busied herself brushing her own wayward hair off her face.

 

“Hello… I’m sorry I didn’t hear you,” she said, putting up a cheerful facade despite the grim look in her dark eyes.

 

He chuckled treading two fingers through his teeming mane. “So I’ve noticed. I must’ve called you ten times. Lunch?” he inquired showing her the sizable package he was carrying.

 

She shook her head. “I didn’t take anything with me this morning. I just came out to get some fresh air.”

 

He carefully kept his smile in place. “That’s alright. I’ve got two sandwiches anyway.” He made to open his parcel. “BLT or Reuben? Or maybe you wanna go to our usual place. At least grab a cup of coffee?”

 

She hesitated before her next words. “BLT and Reuben. Your wife really went all out today,” she said distractedly and without any heat behind her words.

 

He hid his quick calculations behind his beaming smile. “Actually, I made my own lunch today.” He paused for a strategically placed chuckle. “I know, I’m as surprised as you are. Tara and I are taking a cooking class together.” Having grown mostly without a mother, he had learned to cook in his early teens but Carla didn’t know that. He needed to check if his hunch about the origin of her distress was correct.

 

And it was. Carla’s lower lip moved uncertainly while her lashes fluttered quickly a few times as if she was barely restraining herself from bursting into tears at any given moment. “That’s nice,” she said in one long, shuddering rush of hair. “I still don’t think I can stomach anything right now but I wouldn’t say no to some coffee.”

 

“Ladies first then,” he said still grinning gesturing towards the end of the greenery-lined alley, on which they were walking. He did feel a twinge of guilt then. This woman, whom he sympathized with, was in a vulnerable situation and he was taking advantage of it. However, it wasn’t like she was an old, true-blue friend he was betraying. They had only recently made their acquaintance, as he had been ordered to befriend her and learn as much as he could in the process. He felt sorry for Carla, none of this was her fault, but he had a job to do and a duty to flag and country. A lot of people could be in fatal danger if he faltered. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he added after a minute or two of silence. “How did Jennifer’s recital go?”

 

Carla’s profile went pale. “She fell.” She turned a sharp, acerbic gaze on him. “All the other children laughed and pointed at her. She was so humiliated she now throws a crying fit whenever I mention she has to go back to ballet practice.” The corners of her mouth lowered, her expression darkening. She practically hissed her next sentence. “Ray wasn’t even there.” She swallowed hard. “I keep telling him. Jenny hates ballet, she doesn’t want to go but he insists…. He says all the women in his family did ballet and Jenny can’t break with tradition.”

 

“That’s the all American cliché for you. Every little girl dreams of being a ballerina.”

 

She waved a hand between them as they moved out of the lawn and onto the pavement. “Not mine. My little girl wants to climb trees and play in the sand. She wants pants not tutus… and cannot stand those puffy, starchy dresses Ray wants me to put her into at all those tedious society party we have to go to… pardon… attend.”

 

“You don’t sound too happy about going, either,” he pointed out with genuine sympathy.

 

She went in as he held the small cafe’s open for her. “No, I love to go. I just can’t have enough of the insipid gossip of those women of leisure in their very own puffy, starchy dresses. I’m dying to know that the new roses at the country house are distastefully red or who’s having an affair with their tennis instructor….” Her voice caught a little on the last words and his ears perked up.

 

He waited to reply until they were seated and he had had a chance to order them some coffee. “Carla, without wanting to meddle, I think that maybe you should talk to your husband. Make him listen to you. Tell him how unhappy you have been.” His advice was sincere and for one brief moment he hoped he and his superior were wrong about Raymond Reddington.

 

Carla stared at her coral red, short fingernails. “He’d have to have to be home at some point for me to tell him anything,” she snapped then cast a rapid glance at the other, few patrons and immediately lowered her voice. “Jenny… I don’t have her to know something’s wrong. She adores her father. That’s why she doesn’t dare tell him about the ballet. She refuses to disappoint him. Besides, she deserves her happy childhood! I want my perfect baby girl to grow up in a perfect world.”

 

“It doesn’t always work out this way,” he commented quietly.

 

When she raised those deep, dark eyes of hers to meet his gaze again, they were wet with tears. “Raymond’s cheating on me.”

 

“Carla,” he whispered, his chagrin real. Some days he hated his job.

 

“I saw _them_ ,” she spat, the last word uttered as though it was an obscenity. And Carla wasn’t the type to curse. “In our cabin… where he sometimes takes me and Jenny on the weekends… in our own bed! I’ve been suspecting it for a while now. I followed him once after he didn’t turn up to Jenny’s ballet recital. He makes my kid do something she loathes and then he doesn’t even have the decency to show up and he claims he has work. How stupid does he think I am? Doesn’t he remember I went to Yale before I made the mistake of marrying him? So I followed him… how pathetic is that?! And I saw them meet up where the road diverges into the woods. It’s an abandoned forest road. It’s not on any map. Nobody knows it’s there, only us and some old, half deaf fisherman who lives in the valley by the river. As far as affairs go, I suppose he couldn’t find a more discreet place!” She paused to wipe at her eyes with the handkerchief he was quick to supply her. “I know what she looks like. Somehow it’s worse because now I know she’s gorgeous, with long red hair, exciting too probably, nothing like he’s boring working wife who adds to the stress of the Cold War with her nagging.”

 

He sat back in his chair. The reports on the physical appearance of Katarina Rostova varied too much to be reliable. Raymond Reddington could be very well sleeping with a random secretary. He couldn’t take the chance, though. He needed to know if the dissolution of the Reddingtons’ marriage was a threat to national security.

 

“Carla, you’re anything but boring or nagging,” he said meaningfully. “And your husband’s an idiot. He has a career most would kill for, a beautiful wife, a daughter, he really has everything. No woman, no matter how exciting, is worth throwing it all away for!”

 

* * *

 

He walked back towards the Pentagon building with Carla and parted ways with her before the door to her wing. He had offered all the comfort and assurances he could, all the while knowing that if his suspicions were right, her entire life would soon be completely uprooted and Jennifer’s perfect world would be shattered beyond repair. She would also likely hate him for the role he had played in it. He sauntered away, repeating the mantra that had been drilling into him in training in his head. _Never get personally involved in an assignment._ It was rule number one, the most important one, heeding it was vital. He had never understood that necessity better than he did now. He strode to the closest phone booth, paid and dialed. He waited for the tone before speaking.

 

“Hello, operator. This is the Day Manager. ID number Alpha 74 01 13. I request access to the Bird’s Nest.”

 

There was a brief pause on the other end.

 

“Acknowledged, Day Manager. Initiating transfer….”

 

He waited until the familiar, throaty voice of his superior came on the line. He wasted no time in making the expected succinct report. “The target has an affair with a red-haired woman as confirmed by his wife who has followed him on a hunch. Stand by for material confirmation.”

 

“That’s good work, Day Manager. Once you have confirmation, return to the Nest for debrief.”

 

The curt command given, the line went dead. He hung up and pulled on the lapels of his pale gray blazer that had replaced the black leather jacket he had left home wearing that morning. The leather jacket worked for the lowly supply clerk he was telling his wife he was. He didn’t like lying to her but he liked the two of them ending up in prison for treason even less. The smarter blazer fit better the mid-range Pentagon employee persona he had adopted in order to get close to Carla Reddington.

 

He exited the phone booth. He still had to find the Reddington family cabin and identify a spot where two trained spies wouldn’t notice him in order to take the photographs that would serve as the concrete proof needed to launch a full investigation into a respected, highly connected Navy intelligence officer such as Raymond Reddington. Until now all they had had was his superior’s suspicion. With a man like Reddington, it wasn’t enough, not even when one worked in the business of doubt. He pulled his jacket tighter over his white, pressed shirt, to ward off a gust of cold wing, as he plotted his next course of action. Carla had said their cabin was in the Allegheny Mountains…. The music coming from the diner across the street was too loud, making it hard for him to concentrate.

 

 _Look at me standing,_  
Here on my own again,  
Up straight in the sunshine  
No need to run and hide….

He recognized the song as a favorite of his wife’s. _Wonderful Life_ by someone called Black. He had never particularly liked it and had heard it before with no amount of emotion. Yet now, as he was standing in the middle of the street, the surprisingly cold spring zephyr batting at him, the song and lyrics struck him for no reason he could place as a kind of strange, bad omen.

* * *

_Present Day, six months before now_

The restaurant looked entirely respectable: white and red table cloths covered he large, square tables with potted pants for center pieces. The tall, wide windows afforded a good view of well-dressed patrons and the squeaky clean, checkered floor. Jennifer turned to… Kenneth.

“This is not what I had in mind,” she told him.

He ducked his head, regarding her curiously. “And what did you have in mind?”

She shrugged, doubt entering her mind for the first time. “I don’t know… the kind of place you’d go to when you’re in town.”

“This is my favorite restaurant in DC,” he pointed out.

“It’s a family place!”

“Which makes heavenly moussaka and grilled lamb with a wonderfully delicate yogurt sauce with just the finest hint of garlic and a dash of oregano thrown in the mix.”

“I didn’t wanna go in the first place but now that I know they have lamb, I’m chompig at the bit. After all, I’m only having the second or third worst day of my life. I can’t decide, there are so many to choose from. Eating my least favorite food would be the perfect way to end it. Nothing like lamb that makes me hurl on a good day to top off my deep personal crisis.”

Something strange, almost kind fluttered in his eyes, his gaze shifting to luminous. He appeared unfazed by her outburst. On the contrary. He took a step in her direction. Then another. She looked at him uncertainly and not without a hit of unbidden fear. He put an arm around her middle, his hold light, easy to shake off, should she try. Then his other arm came around her quaking shoulders. She had never realized she was shaking before. She leaned on him, her face pressed against the slightly scratchy material of his coffee-colored suit jacket. He smelled warmlyof sandalwood, jasmine and bergamot. His arm descended from her shoulders, his palm splaying on her back, holding her more securely to him. She didn’t feel like crying. All her tears seemed to have dried out, but she was still reeling from the unspent anger and the sensation of being utterly and completely lost dueling for the control of her mind and her emotions.

Idly she wondered if she hadn’t perhaps lost her mind. However, the arms around her were strong, an unexpected anchor as everything she had ever believed was coming undone around her. So maybe she had lost her mind, allowing this dangerous man, this criminal, to hold her, but then what value did sanity carry in the waking nightmare she was living?

“Alright then,” he said after a while, his thick, velvety voice reverberating in her bones. “We’ll go somewhere with no lamb.”

 


	6. Never Let Go

_May 1988_

He opened the door to his house with a secret sigh of relief. His wife claimed she wasn’t done decorating it but he loved just the way it was. His family home. It was lovely, warm and welcoming. As much as he hated having to lie to his family about what he did, he had to admit his job had its perks, the pay being chief among them. His salary wasn’t extraordinary but it was good and it enabled them to afford a comfortable house on a quiet street in Takoma Park. That was nothing to scoff at. He spared a quick thought to his most recent assignment. Raymond Reddington had everything he had once wanted, more even. Being the captain of a ship, his formerly most cherished dream, was available to Reddington. All he needed to do was reach out and take it. And yet he was throwing it all away with both hands: family, career, flag and country. And for what? Because he was bored? Everybody should have Reddington’s problems. Apparently, perfection wasn’t good enough for the guy. He wanted extra thrills. If only he were the only one affected by what was coming to him! His poor, innocent wife and daughter didn’t deserve the landslide of misfortune and public humiliation that was sure to ensure. He shook his head, banishing all thought of work. He couldn’t imagine ever doing what the other man did: turning his back on family, duty and honor like this.

“Sweetheart,” he called out removing his black leather jacket and hanging it up in the foyer. “I’m home.”

The notes of another one of his wife’s favorite songs that he disliked were drifting through the house and he followed them to the kitchen but not before surveying his person once more. He made sure his jeans, black boots and pale blue T-shirt bore no mud strains from his trekking through the woods on the tail of Reddington and his Soviet spy mistress. He finally had incriminating pictures to show his superior. Next the Office of Naval Intelligence would launch its own investigation and Reddington would be most likely court-marshaled but that was no longer his concern.

His wife was bent over the counter, dressed in a long, flowing, flower printed dress, her long, flaxen tresses mounted in a ponytail. The kitchen smelled of pepper and of the pot roast stewing on the stove. His grin broadened. The golden sun rays spilling from the window enveloped his wife as if in a halo. In that moment she seemed like the most beautiful woman on earth to him. Men like Raymond Reddington might have every advantage in life just handed to them on a silver platter but he was the truly lucky. oneHe turned the volume of the radio on the window sill higher and moved to wrap his arms around his wife’s waist from behind. He pressed a light kiss on the side of her neck.

“Hello, sweetheart, let’s dance.”

She giggled when he spun her around and began swaying them to the rhythm of the music. When she put it in his, her hand was still wet, studs at her wrist. Around them the melody went on.

 _I know all the rules and then I know how to break 'em_  
And I always know the name of the game  
But I don't know how to leave you  
And I'll never let you fall  
And I don't know how you do it

_Making love out of nothing at all…._

  


“What got into you? You hate this song.”

He looked into her clear, bright eyes and his heart leapt in his chest. “I love you.”

She grew serious all of the sudden. “This is the first time you ever said it.”

“I know and I’m sorry it took me this long. You were right and that therapist that you dragged us to was right, as much as I am loath to admit it. I did have regrets and I did wonder what might have been.”

She shook her head. “That’s okay. I expected you to. Anyone would’ve had regrets. I would’ve had regrets! You were accepted to Annapolis at 17, you had a girlfriend and she wasn’t me….”

His lips twitched. “No, she wasn’t you! You wouldn’t have stopped responding to my letters without so much as a by-your-leave. If you wanted to break up, you would’ve told me so.”

“Nevertheless… you could’ve been a Naval officer by now, maybe even a ship captain like you always dreamed.You could’ve married a debutante!”

His laughter caught in his throat. In the background the song ended. Carla Reddington had been a debutante. It was odd. It was almost like he and Raymond Reddington had led some sort of parallel lives. Only that Reddington had gotten everything he had ever wanted. Of course Reddington had had other things going for him too: he had been born to a wealthy Bostonian family and on his father’s side, they had been Navy officers since the Civil War. He was practically Navy royalty. And if Reddington hadn’t wanted a top-off on having it all, he would have made admiral, Secretary of the Navy, even president.

“Instead I married the prom queen.” He kissed her briefly on the forehead. “Joke’s on whoever got the deb.”

She frowned slightly and stopped swaying, bringing their impromptu dance to a halt. “I’m serious. You were on your way but then you came home the summer after your first year at the Naval Academy, had a fling with me, I got pregnant and you had to go and do the right and marry me. You got expelled. The end! No more career. No ships to captain. Just long, boring hours as a storage clerk and a family to support.”

Now he did laugh. His work was anything but boring. In fact, some days it was too exciting. Just a few months ago a Soviet illegal he had uncovered had shot at him and then tried to strangle him. He managed to get himself in hand quickly, though, and schooled his features back to sobriety. Sometimes his training came in handy on the home front too.

“We were both there when we conceived our daughter,” he pointed out. “It was only fair we should both take responsibility.”

“I know, I know… value loyalty above everything else. Loyalty and honor. You really would’ve made a great Navy officer.”

He cast aside the brief sting of regret quickly. “I know but it doesn’t mean I’m less happy with what I have now. In fact, I have my doubts my life would’ve been better with the uniform but without you two. You, our daughter, us, this is what truly matters. The secret, fervent wish I always had without even being aware of it. You and Ellie are worth so much more to me than any career.” He squeezed her to him. “Our family is the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t care none of it was planned. It’s right and it’s real. With you and Ellie I’m home. No matter where I am and what I’m doing, all I can think of is finding my way back to you two. Don’t you understand? Tara, I already have my bright future right here in this house. All I want to do now is take your hands in mine, hold on tight and never let go.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “You, charmer, you,” she quipped but without any heat.

“Says the prom queen,” he said while smiling.

She beamed at him through the tears. “Oh, and by the way, I love you too.”

In response he leaned in and sealed his lips over hers. The kiss escalated quickly, heat blossoming between them. He pushed her on her back on the kitchen table, while her hands were roaming hungrily over the smooth skin of his back beneath the bunched up cotton of his T-shirt.

“Oh, gross! Mom, Dad! And in the kitchen too… we eat on that table.”

“I’m sorry, darling,” he said surreptitiously pulling his T-shirt back down after hastily standing up.

His daughter dashed to switch off the radio that was now playing a moody rock song about the impossibility of living with or without a person.

“Keep it down, will you?” The little girl was apparently on a roll. “Some of us have homework to do.”

He exchanged sheepish glance with his wife. “I’m sorry, Elle. And we’ll try to keep it quiet in here. What kind of homework are you doing, honey? Do you need any help?”

His own green eyes glared back at him, his daughter’s beautiful face filled with righteous condemnation. “Don’t try and change the subject, Dad. I know what you were doing.”

His wife turned from where she had checked on the pot roast. “Ellie, honey, we’ve explained this to you. It’s perfectly natural. It’s an expression of the love your father and I have for each other.”

Elle didn’t look convinced. “Meanwhile normal parents fight. You should give that a try sometimes. This way we wouldn’t have to burn the kitchen table. Now I have Math homework to finish and pirouettes to practice.”

“We’ll be quiet,” he mother promised.

“Scout’s honor,” her father was quick to add.

“You got kicked out of the Boyscouts, Dad!”

When the girl left, her father turned to the mother.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” she said. “You’re the one who graduated high school a year early. It’s you she takes after!”

“And yet she spends most of her time with you,” he tossed back. “It’s the age-old nurture versus nature debate, sweetheart.”

She threw her hands apart, adopting a look of mock chagrin. “Fine, our daughter’s smart, driven and knows what she wants. She’s the first in her class and may have a future as a ballerina. And I’m taking all the credit!”

He just threw his head back and laughed heartily in reply.

* * *

_Now_

 

A sharp beep coming from one of the many machines keeping him tied to the hospital bed startled Jennifer. She looked at the two display monitors in concern then made to reach for the button that summoned the nurse, when she saw it. The rapid movement of his eyeballs behind his closed lids. His discolored, nearly white, started to move slowly.

 

“ _in the dawn…. Of a most stormy life—was drawn….”_

 

The words came out mostly garbled but he was getting clearer towards the end.

 

_From ev’ry depth of good and ill_

_The mystery which binds me still—_

 

Jennifer depressed the alarm button by the bed then jumped to her feet and ran into the corridor.

 

“Nurse!” She saw Dembe getting up from the uncomfortable-looking plastic chair across the hall from her. His dark eyes were red-rimmed and profound exhaustion was etched onto his features. She saw hints of white in the beard that had begun to grow on his face after so many days spent in the hospital without shaving. She darted to him and grabbed him by the shoulders, trembling as she did.

 

“Dembe, he’s waking up.”

 

* * *

 

The heavy door to Liz’s change creaked open with a metallic whine. Liz sat up on her narrow cot that was more of an instrument of punishment rather than a bed. A cold, white beam of artificial light stabbed at her eyes and she winced. She had no idea how long she had been there. The only change in her solitude had been the trays of food and water passed to her though an opening at the base of the door keeping her prisoner. They fed her enough so that she wouldn’t starve. Other than that she had had no other human interaction. No light, either. Alone in darkness with no hope of ever seeing the light or another face ever again.

 

Her jailer appeared in the lit doorway. Liz squinted.

 

“Get up and get out. You’re no longer my problem,” came the sharp, dry command.

 

Liz rose on wobbly legs, stumbled a little and straightened herself with a hand on the bed.

 

“Red?” she croaked, her voice and throat scratchy, blinking blearily against the sudden onslaught of light. “How’s he? Did the antidote work?”

 

The glare she received for her troubles could have leveled several city blocks. “Why else would I be letting you go? He covered for you yet again. He said he took the poison himself.”

 

Liz rubbed at her grimy eyes daring to take the chance of a few steps towards the door. The cement floor was ice cold beneath her bare feet. “Did he say why?”

 

“To stop the investigation into you, of course. He had no means to keep Dr. Sharon Fulton from testifying, though. Not from his hospital bed, anyway.”

 

The silhouette in the doorway change. Liz’s next steps brought her face-to-face with a grim-looking Ressler.

 

“Liz, turn around,” he said softly, somberly.

 

“Ress, what’s going on?”

 

“Masha Rostova, you’re under arrest for obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence and conspiring to release a federal fugitive.”

 

Ressler pressed a hand on her shoulder, as she was too stunned to react, and a moment later the cool metal of the cuffs was biting into her wrist.

 

“I’m not Masha Rostova,” she said reflexively. Realistically she knew she was but she didn’t recognize that identity on any personal level.

 

“You’re not Elizabeth Scott, either,” the coldly-voice, more than slightly triumphant retort resounded after her as Ressler led her down the narrow, neon-lit, gray corridor.

 

As she was walking, cuffed and still bare foot, she knew she was a woman condemned. Not unfairly, mind you. She had indeed broken her oath to the FBI and let Sharon Fulton go free for her own personal interests. But she knew that wasn’t the only thing she was paying for, no, her ledge was full and brimming, and a reckoning was still to come. The man she had wronged the most had just woken up and though she was aware that he would be coming for her, she couldn’t find it within her to feel anything other than elation at the thought. He was alright. He had survived. The odds might as well give up. They would never get the upper hand when fighting with him. And he was coming for her. She should have been terrified but the thrill running up her spine had nothing to do with fear. For soon she would see him.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Faux Red and his wife are dancing to is Air Supply's "Making Love Out Of Nothing At All". I know it's kinda cheesy but it was the 1980s.
> 
> When waking up, Red's murmuring a fragment of Edgar Allan Poe's "Alone", the same poem Jennifer read to him last chapter. IMHO it fits Faux Red down to a T.


	7. Bloody Raymond

All this hard luck in this town has found me,

Nobody knows what troubles are all around me.

(Ella Fitzgerald, _When I Get Low, I Get High_ )

_Present Day, six months before now_

Jennifer glanced out of the window of the imposter’s impressive Mercedes. They had stopped on a narrow, quaint street she had a hard time associating with a master criminal, before one of those boho chic boutiques.

“What are we doing in Reston?” she wanted to know.

“Visiting an old friend.”

He sauntered out of the car and came to hold her door open for her. “And you need a dress,” he added genially as she got out too. “Jennifer… you might want to look at this evening like an opportunity.”

She became curious as they were standing face-to-face on the narrow sidewalk. “What kind of opportunity?”

“As I had ample means to find out myself, playing at being somebody else can prove therapeutic. It makes one forget their woes if only for a while. When you pretend you’re not you, you may as well pretend your troubles away.”

“Is that why you’re doing it?”

He laughed but it sounded bitter. “At times.” The creases around his eyes deepened and a twinge of sorrow briefly filled his face. “It doesn’t always work,” he continued. “But every now and then you manage to successfully tell yourself the worst of what happened to you is in someone else’s past.”

He had her undivided attention now. “And when it all comes back?”

“It’s worse than ever but you still kept it at bay for one night. For a few hours the weight of the world wasn’t on your shoulders and you weren’t living alone in a ghost town with only darkness and the specters of your past for company.”

She saw a muscle twitch in his left cheek and frowned. “Is that what you think I’m doing right now?”

“I think you want to forget and I happen to know not using your own name aids with that.”

“How long has it been since you said your name?”

He sighed and drew a cautious step back. “In many cultures, including this one, names have power. Saying somebody’s name can give one power over the person or invoke great evil.”

“Like Bloody Mary?”

He chuckled. “Yes, but something much worse than a vengeful spirit appears when my name is said out loud.” He drew a deep breath and gesture towards the shop before them. “It was mere a suggestion, anyway. Take it as you will. Shall we?”

A merry chime greeted them as they opened the all-glass door to the shop. There was a bell atop the entrance apparently. It smelled of lime and sugared currant inside.

“I’m sorry we’re about to close,” came an elegantly-accented voice from behind the tall, ornate pale beige counter.

A mop of curly, chestnut hair rose above the polished edge and a pair of bright, brown eyes fixed on them. The woman’s thick, lush lips covered in fine sheen of light brown lipstick curled in a wide grin when she noticed the Concierge of Crime. She quickly rounded the counter and swayed her way to them. She was already tall but her impossibly high black pumps put at her at a head taller than him. She was smart and surprisingly somber for the artfully colored mayhem around them, dressed simply in a black pencil skirt and a fawn shirt with white ruffles at the front.

“Sugary Red,” she enthused and placed her long-fingered hands on his cheeks before leaning in for a passionate kiss that cared nothing for their audience. This close Jennifer noted her hair only seemed tousled but, in fact, her glossy curls were artistically arranged to frame her face.

“Where have you been hiding, my international man of mystery?” the woman asked when they finally stopped sucking face.

He wrapped his arms around her waist pulling her to him. “I think you just answered you own question, my dear,” he fired back playfully and kissed her again.

Jennifer looked away. “Should I be giving you some privacy?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey,” the woman said not without sympathy in her melodic voice. “It’s just that we’re old friends and we haven’t seen each other in a quite while.” She unwrapped herself from Red and went to hold out a hand to Jennifer. She had short, cappuccino-colored fingernails. “I’m Gabrielle, by the way.”

Jennifer looked over Gabrielle’s shoulder to… Kenneth. “Ruth,” Jennifer said on an impulse and shook the tips of Gabrielle’s fingers. “Nice to meet you.”

The other woman smiled, a mysterious gleam in her eyes. She was older than Jennifer, in her forties maybe, and was exceptionally beautiful. “Pleasure’s all mine,” she intoned before turning so she could eye Kenneth too. “What can I do for you two?”

Kenneth grinned beatifically. “Ruth here needs one of your many talents, Gabby.”

Gabrielle’s left eyebrow went up. “Oh. For?”

“A night out on the town.”

Gabrielle’s grin widened further. “My favorite kind.” She pressed a hand to Jennifer’s right shoulder to steer her along towards the back of the store. “Come on, honey, let’s see if I can make it up to you for making you uncomfortable earlier.”

“It’s alright,” Jennifer mumbled awkwardly. The other woman’s confidence made her feel like a maladroit teenager shopping for her first school dance dress. “We’re not, I mean, he and I… we’re not….”

Gabrielle pulled her into an enormous, well-lit dressing room with items of clothing hanging everywhere except for one wall that was covered entirely by a huge, gleaming mirror. “Not yet, you mean.”

Jennifer felt her cheeks burning. She was really too old to have so little experience with this but such were the drawbacks when one spent their entire life in hiding and wary of any new connection. She was all kinds of sheltered. Aside from Ian and the constantly changing menial jobs she had taken to avoid detection, she knew nothing or next to it, anyway.

“No,” Jennifer said weakly. “It’s not like that.”

Gabrielle raised another eyebrow. “You have a pulse, don’t you? Believe me, with him it’s only a question of when. Besides, why not? He’s immensely fun and knows how to treat a woman. They don’t make them like him anymore.” She winked at Jennifer.

“I don’t think I’m his type,” Jennifer put up another feeble defense.

A bouncy French tune made its way from the outer shop.

Gabrielle grinned again. “It seems Red found my record player from where it was buried beneath a pile of scarves and a cardigan.” She met Jennifer’s eyes and reached to brush her fair away from her face. “You have such unique features. Why do you insist on hiding them? On hiding yourself?” He turned her towards the mirror. “Look at your. Really look! Notice your porcelain skin, your well-proportionate, full cheeks, your high forehead and your eyes… many women would kill for that electric sapphire blue.” He pushed Jennifer’s head slightly to the side. “How delightful! They change nuance with the light. Now they seem almost olive. And I bet you have dimples when you smile. Try and show me, please.”

Jennifer curved her lips uncertainly and was taken aback by the way her whole face lit up, eyes sparkling, and dimples forming in the fleshy part of her cheeks. If only her lips weren’t cracked and pale!

Gabrielle leaned in to whisper in her like a snake about to lead into temptation. “I know what you’re thinking… red lipstick, a shade leaning towards crimson, matte rather than luscious but nothing too dull. We’re going to create a work of art together, I promise you.”

An hour or so later, Jennifer staggered out of the dressing room in a tiny scrap of blue satin and the highest heeled, most elegant sandals she had ever seen let alone worn: an intricate looping of silvery straps that whorled all the way to her ankles. Her hair had been moussed and combed behind her ears, her own curls arranged neatly with only one falling as if accidentally over her forehead. The shadows around her eyes had been obscured behind several layers of concealer and foundation, she wore black mascara, garnet red lipstick and a Channel scent. She caught Kenneth in the process of studying a glass-topped area of the counter, leaning only a little forward, his posture strangely imposing. Jennifer found herself eying his broad shoulders that made him look taller than he really was and his well-filled, outstanding three-piece suit. He somehow seemed to be towering over the whole room without even trying. She caught herself! She had to be out of her mind to be ogling this immensely dangerous man. But then she was pretending to be someone else and looking wasn’t a crime.

He turned and looked at her himself, his mouth falling slightly opened. “Wow!” His eyes were darker now and full of genuine wonder.

Jennifer preened a little and smiled.

“Gabrielle, you’re an artist, of course, but in this case you also benefited from having such a lovely canvass.”

 _Oh boy_ , Jennifer thought. No wonder he was a wanted criminal. It should be illegal for him to pay a compliment to a woman in that low, low, throaty voice. He pointed to something in the glass case next and Gabrielle nodded with yet another one of her wide grins.

“I couldn’t have chosen better myself,” she said and took out a gold choker with tiny, white pearls lodged in between the links.

He grasped and moved towards Jennifer who compliantly raised the hair at the back of her neck. The necklace came right around the base of her throat, light and cool against her skin that broke into goosebumps when the warm tips of his fingers grazed it as he was fastening the piece of jewelry on her.

* * *

They went to a place called Le Claire’s pawn shop. Up front it did look like a pawn shop but in the back there was another story… and a whole other world, in fact. A model pretty hostess in a little black dress met them. He was right about her needing a dress. There was no way they would have let her in in her well-worn jeans, baggy T-shirt, unruly hair and jacket she had bought from Walmart because it was on sale.

“Mr. Gibbons.” The name flew off Kenneth’s tongue with ease, as they wandered inside.

“Mr. Gibbons,” the hostess said. “It’s good to have you back. Please follow me. Would you like to check your coat?”

“No, thank you,” he replied politely.

The hostess showed them to a table at the back that gave them a generous view of the room. Sharp, blue eyes turned to Jennifer.

“What would you like?” he asked.

She shrugged, grateful to be sitting down. The short trip from the car had been an immense chore, the sandals were gorgeous, but her feet were killing her. “Your call,” she replied.

He nodded and smiled up to the waitress, who, much like the hostess, looked like a model, tall, slim and redheaded, and was dressed as if for a cocktail party. The waitress also seemed to be in the process of melting at the sight of his toothy, sunny smile that animated his entire face, creasing his skin in an adorable manner.

“An absinthe fountain and two glasses,” he ordered. “I’ll prepare the drip myself.”

“Right away, Sir.”

“Do you smoke, Jennifer?” he inquired turning his attention on an embellished, ruddy wooden box on one side of the table, once the waitress departed.

“I smoked pot once in college but I didn’t feel anything so I think it must’ve been oregano.”

He chuckled. “They don’t have marijuana here but they do prepare a deliciously rich hashish pipe, should you want to try. Nothing stronger, though. This place cannot afford the ruckus overexcited clients could cause.”

She leaned over the table staring at him suspiciously. “What is this place, anyway? A kind of speakeasy?”

“Actually it’s called a smokeasy. This one in particular is a hot spot for people like me to meet and mingle. A den of depravity and vice, if you will.”

“So it’s like Switzerland. A neutral zone.”

He laughed as he looked through the opened box on the table, a slight frown curving his light-colored eye-brow. “I suppose so,” he answered and he picked up a cigar, capped it and then lit it using a match instead of a lighter. “Would you like to try?”

“Is that a Cuban?”

“Yes. Hoyo de Monterrey Double Corona, to be more precise. It’s a better choice for beginners than the Cohiba Behike I like to smoke, less strong. You’d love the mix of coffee and cocoa in the aroma and the spicy aftermath that nips at your tongue just so.”

She recognized the brand name Cohiba from back when she had waited tables at an upscale hotel bar. It was expensive, very expensive, in fact. It gave her no pause. She reached over the table and took the cigar from, uncertainly waving it around. “How do I….?”

He grinned mischievously. “It’s not like with marijuana. Do not inhale. You’re meant to savor the flavor so you’ll have to hold the smoke in your mouth for a few moments to before you let it go.”

As she tried, the waitress returned with a metallic mini-fountain, the glasss tank on top filled with ice water, two sour glasses, a bottle the label of which her bartender experience hadn’t taught her about, two leaf-shaped spoons with small, regularly-spaced holes drilled on both sides, napkins and a black porcelain sugar bowl. He thanked the waitress with yet another megawatt smile and then switched his attention from the cigars to newly brought implements. He poured a measuring of something that looked like lime green liquid fire in one of the glasses and put the spoon topped with a sugar cube across the rim. Then he placed it under the spigot of the fountain and turned it on, allowing the water to begin to drip. Immediately the sugary fluid started to run down into the glass, spoiling the perfect clarity of the absinthe.

Jennifer set her cigar in the obviously crystal ashtray in the middle of the table. She had done as he instructed but she had taste no cocoa, coffee or spice, only smoke. Perhaps it took a tried hand. “Good to know,” she remarked with a grunt of approval. “This will be a nifty trick to master, if I ever wanna go back into bartending. What’s it called?”

“It’s a classic way to serve absinthe, most commonly referred to as a drip,” he replied and seeing that the sugar cube had melted entirely, he mixed the drink with the spoon before handing the milky, swirling result to her. “Now be careful. The green fairy has been rumored to drive people mad.”

She took a cautious sip. It was minty and sweet and intense, a little like strong herbal tea that burnt her on its way down her throat. “This is different!” She took a second gulp. “I could get used to it.”

He smiled, eyes twinkling, as he absently prepared a helping of the concoction for himself as well.

“Why are you doing this?”

“What?”

She waved a hand around herself. “This… the shop earlier.” She touched a hand to her choker. “This one alone must’ve cost you more than I make in a month waiting tables.”

He stirred his drink. “It didn’t cost me anything, actually. Gabrielle runs a lucrative courier business and I’m one of her biggest clients. The boutique is more of a hobby for her and her efforts with you or anyone else I might bring by, for that matter, are something of a fringe benefit.”

She narrowed her eyes, wondering how many women he had brought by Gabrielle’s in the past. Above all she wondered if he had done that with her sister.

“No,” he said as he cut the cap of a fresh cigar. “I offered to take Elizabeth there once… I think it was for a Guayabera dress but she turned me down. So no, I’ve never brought her there.”

She blinked away the distraction. “You still haven’t answered my question,” she pointed out.

“Consider it a royalty check for all the years I spent impersonating your father.”

“Is that why you’re looking out for my mother, too?”

He wrapped the tip of his tongue along one end of his cigar, looking pensive all of the sudden. Jennifer became distracted again.

“I wronged your mother. I broke her trust. It couldn’t be helped at the time but still she didn’t deserved better than yet another betrayal, especially in that particular moment.”

“We’re not your family!”

He drew on his cigar and drank from his glass again. “I know. Otherwise the way we stared at each other in Gabrielle’s store would have mightily inappropriate.”

He had caught it! She took an overly ambitious gulp of her absinthe and nearly choked. She set her glass back on the table. “You might’ve noticed I’m not very smooth.”

“Your slight awkwardness is charming. Natural directness is not something I’m used to anymore.”

Oh, but he was smooth! Apparently he could turn anything into a compliment. She ducked her head, bashful all of the sudden and annoyed at herself for it.

“Is your family a subject you really want to belabor tonight?” he asked placidly.

She finished her drink and pushed the glass back towards the fountain. “Belabor? Who even says that? I want to try making the next round.”

“I do. And by all means.” He turned the fountain with the sprout facing her. “They’re called absinthina, these accoutrements used to serve the vert—that’s French for green. Since absinthe was once banned for its alleged psychotropic effects, the older ones are spell-binding treasure troves of forbidden art. Easy….” He directed her with a hand placed over her fingers. “The absinthe drip is more art than science. You mustn’t let the fountain run too fast, it’ll dilute the drink. The correct ration is no higher than 5:1 water t o absinthe.”

She nodded and adjusted the water as he had instructed. “Accoutrements?” she parroted back sarcastically.

He smiled genially. “Oh, yes. I own a silver six spigot Legler Pernod absinthe fountain that’s worth close to 100,000 dollars among certain collectors.”

“You’re kidding.”

Her sister was planning to exploit this man’s love in all the wrong ways. Sure he had stolen their father’s identity but there was no reason why he couldn’t pay for it in castles in France and BMWs.

* * *

Kenneth had a rich, deep-throaty laughter that seemed to roll through her bones. It was its own kind of resonant bass melody. She staggered on her punishing heels and he straightened her with a wide, warm hand on the cool skin of her upper arm. He took off his jacket and placed it over her shoulders. They were just outside Le Claire’s pawn shop, wrapped in the gray light of early dawn, because the smokeasy closed right before the sun rose.

“I haven’t laughed like that… I can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard.” His words trailed into sadness.

She wiped her cheeks. She had been chortling so hard herself she had somewhere along the way burst into tears without even noticing. She was so drunk her face felt numb. Her mouth tasted like alcoholic herbs and smoke.

“Yeah, me neither,” she muttered staring intently at the lush, rose Cupid’s bow of his lips. Then she leaned and their mouths almost met before his hands grabbed her firmly by the shoulders and pushed her away, steadying her on the pavement.

“Jennifer, I’m flattered and you’re not an easy to resist young woman but… you’re also very drunk and very distraught.”

The sting of rejection sobered her up a bit. “I know what I’m doing,” she sulked.

He smiled wryly. “Yes, drowning your sorrows. I speak from experience when I say there are entirely regretful things one can do to achieve that.”

“Is it because of _her_?”

“No, Jennifer. I’m many things, one worse than the other, but I would never take advantage of a woman in your state.”

“Elizabeth thinks you love her and not in a daddy way… unless, of course, you’re in a Lana Del Rey song.”

He locked eyes with her, his gaze sharpened like a weapon, piercing all the way to the most hidden depth of her soul but the expression on his face was one of unadulterated grief. It sobered her further, making her realize what the mix of alcohol and the humiliation of his rejection had pushed her to tell him.

“You didn’t betray your sister, Jennifer,” he said after a terse pause, his expression softening. “I already knew. Elizabeth doesn’t apologize or say ‘thank you’ to me without an ulterior reason. I realized she knew the truth the instant the word ‘sorry’ left her lips.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The author does not condone drug use, recreational or otherwise, or excessive alcohol consumption.


	8. Two Ghosts

_Six Months Ago_

Liz opened her refrigerator door with a heavy sigh. It was empty safe for a half-drunk bottle of Chardonnay. What if she wouldn’t give for a bag of frozen peas to hold over her throbbing black eye? She would have to do without, though. She pulled out the bottle and held the cold glass over her eye for a few moments before taking a hefty gulp then putting it back over her pained swollen lid. She felt like one big ache, the fury doing too little to dull the sorrow. He had lied. All he had done was like while swearing he was telling the truth. To her and only her. Because she was special. But he had been only using her. She should have heeded all the warning she had gotten. From Carla Reddington, from Emma Knightly, from Kate, from Kirk. And he had let her believe he was her father. She could tear him limb from limb for that alone. Somehow it was worse than when she had discovered the truth about Tom. Even Tom, she had doubted in the end but him…. Him, she had just believed. She had bought it all hook, line and sinker.

She smashed the wine bottle on the edge of her kitchen counter. It hurt, the pain sharp and eviscerating. She had no idea why but now that she was alone and taking a brief pause from scheming to pay him in kind, the anguish was unavoidable. She grabbed the cool stone of the counter with her hands, her knuckles chalky white from the grip. She ached and she wanted to howl and hurl but instead she started to hyperventilate. Breath stuttered uneasily out of her throat. She felt like she was suffocating. She should be angry with him for the role he had played in Tom’s death. Too late had he come for them. His secret has already killed her husband but all she felt was grief. She had been mostly stunned when she had lost Tom, furious with herself for not feeling more and trying to compensate for the bareness inside her with acts of vengeance. She felt grief now, though, and it was horrible, choking and volcanic. She wanted to kill and maim but most of all, she wanted to put her hands on him and shake him as hard as she could demanding answers. Demanding that he told her his devotion to her had not been a like, unlike everything else. And she wanted to cry and seek shelter and solace into his arms. It was humiliating and it made her hate him even more.

It didn’t matter. What she had been through with Tom had taught her how to stab with an invisible knife there, where it truly hurt, where it would make the imposter feel like he was bleeding to death. Just like she was feeling now. Unwanted or not, she had slipped under his skin when he was looking. It was her only ace in the hole and she was determined to use it. Bullets were too quick but Tom had taught her how to leave scars that would last.

There was a knock on the door and she quickly scrubbed cold water from the tap on her face and went to answer, one hand on the gun still strapped to her lower back. She shouldn’t have worried. It was only Cooper.

“Liz,” he said gently as she invited him, mentally checking if she had closed the kitchen door. She didn’t want him to see the mess she had made.

His eyes were searching her face, concern written all over his features. Liz forced a smile to her lips and asked him to sit down. He did, the frown still knitting his brows.

“How are you, Liz?” he asked meaningfully.

She shook her head. “As well as it can be expected but mostly I’m angry.”

He nodded. “That’s understandable. Do you have any idea what he might have done to your father?”

She lowered her gaze to the floor, the mix of fury and pain rising within her again. “There was a time he tried to convince me I had killed him like a child. I….” She paused licking at her lips nervously. “I even recalled doing it but he modified my memories so much who knows what he planted in. I think he killed my father to take his place. It’s what drove my mother to suicide. Kirk was right but not in the way he thought. He destroyed my parents. I don’t know why but I’m gonna find out.” She gritted her teeth. There was a hurricane raging inside of her.

“I’m sorry, Liz,” he said, his eyes full of compassion. “I truly believed that Reddington is your father.”

“He is,” she snapped. “But the man who surrendered to the FBI five years isn’t Raymond Reddington. Five years! It was right in front of me. I can’t believe I didn’t see it. Poor Carla tried to warn me. She said he wasn’t who I thought he was.” She paused. “You said you were on a mission together.”

“Not exactly,” he corrected. “I only saw Raymond Reddington once, after Seaduke had tortured him and his face was so swollen and bruised his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. All the years he was on our Most Wanted list we only had one photo of him, as you know, and even that wasn’t usable. But he had Reddington’s last known, State Department issued passport, when he surrendered. We assumed just like everyone else that it was him. People pretend to be law-enforcement all the time but who claims to be a criminal then gives himself up running the risk of being executed for his alias’ crimes? It doesn’t make any sense!”

She poked at at the insides of her mouth restlessly. She didn’t care how little sense it made. She had no time for patience for abstract reasoning. All she wished to do was sate the beast hollering within her depths and get on with destroying the imposter.

_The instinct to jump in is not gonna serve you well here._

It was his steady, low baritone that calmed her and for a split second that alone made her so mad she could barely see straight. She swallowed hard to cover for it and try to present a collected facade for Cooper. She didn’t want him to think her out of her mind for fear that he wouldn’t help her if he did, though that was precisely how she felt: dangerously off kilter. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not his daughter,” she stated. The relief was strange and almost unwelcome. Liz chose not to examine it further. “He played us,” she hissed. “He would do anything, say anything to accomplish his goals. That’s all we are to him, Sir, means to an end! And we’ve let him get away with it for too long. It’s time we make him pay.”

She didn’t like how Cooper scowled at her last words. “I can understand you’re upset. He disrupted your whole life, he got your husband killed and spent nearly two years pretending to be your father, getting close to you. I understand you feel used. But do you really believe he faked everything? He’s not your father. That much is certain.” He reached into an inside jacket pocket with a troubled look on his face and extracted a small manila envelope. “I did what you asked. I took the hairs you lifted off him when you hugged him after Sutton Ross and gave them to a private lab I know I can trust. I had them repeat the test three times. You and… whoever he is aren’t even biologically related. So I can’t help but wonder why he cares so much for you. I can’t help but think you’re wondering too.”

Liz clenched her jaw. She couldn’t share with Cooper what she suspected of the imposter’s true feelings for her. It was enough that her own skin crawled with disgust. Or at least, she thought it was disgust. “He’s incapable of feeling,” she retorted. “Don’t be fooled by the outer shell. He’s a monster, a psychopath.”

Cooper’s brow furrowed further. “He’s never told you what went on here during your absence… when we all thought you were dead, has he? I’ve never seen anyone so devastated, so utterly shattered. Do you know he collapsed? If Dembe hadn’t been there to support him, he would have fallen to the ground. I’ll never forget the way he kept looking around the Post Office, as if he couldn’t believe you wouldn’t ever come back there again. Then he lost his mind. He really went off the deep end trying to avenge you. I’m not proud to say I let him because I knew he would do what we couldn’t. Until then I never thought him capable of caring for anyone, either, but I do believe in his own twisted way he does have feelings for you. I won’t pretend I know or understand their nature. I’m not sure I want to. Nor am I saying that gives him a pass for anything. But, Liz, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to destroy him?”

“He took everything from me. My family, my husband, I had to give away my daughter… he even took my life because I may still be breathing but I feel as if I’m dead inside. If you were in my shoes, wouldn’t want to punish him too?”

Cooper’s lips twisted wryly. “I know someone at the Bureau of Naval Personnel. The FBI’s supposed to have all the records on Reddington but something always gets omitted for this or that reason. Maybe she can shed light on what got overlooked.”

“Are you gonna tell your friend why you’re asking?” Liz inquired worriedly. “He has eyes and ears everywhere.”

“I’m the Assistant Director for Counter-terrorism. There’s a myriad of reasons I could invoke. Without the skeleton we have no proof. If we try to make an official investigation out of it, it would only make people think we went the way of Mulder and Scully or worse, tip him off that we’re on to him. I agree with you. We must proceed with the utmost discretion.”

“Official investigations into him have a way of going nowhere fast, anyway,” she muttered dryly.

Cooper nodded grimly. “I’m sad to say the corruption in our government runs so deep, too many people like him skate by without any difficulty.”

Liz scoffed. “I remember what he once said to me. That the world is run by corporations and criminals.”

“He should know!” Cooper frowned again. He truly looked uneasy about this whole thing. “I can’t help but think about Gregory Devry. He pulled this imposter stunt right under our nose without batting an eye.” Cooper sounded almost impressed. “And none of us suspected anything!” Now he switched back to frustrated.

“Hiding in plain sight,” Liz murmured.

She liked this one of Cooper’s frowns the least.

“What is it?” she wanted to know.

“It’s what we teach our intelligence operatives to do when they go undercover.”

Liz scowled. “Not just US operatives are taught that,” she remarked darkly.

Cooper’s expression softened instantly. “You’re thinking about Tom, aren’t you?” He rested a hand over hers.

Liz’s fingers went stiff in Cooper’s reassuring hold. She nodded, as anxiety sliced through her. She wanted to squirm, restless in her own skin. Cooper went on talking, his voice warm and comforting, but Liz wasn’t listening. Out of the corner of one eye she saw a framed photograph of herself, Tom and Agnes nearby and was filled with a sudden and inexplicable rage.

* * *

With Cooper gone, Liz returned to the picture of her, Tom and Agnes as a baby. Without hesitation she took a swipe at it sending tumbling to the floor. The glass broke with a satisfying crack. She wasn’t sure why she had done it but in the months to come she would come to look back upon that moment as the one when she had begun to suspect it wasn’t Tom’s ghost that was haunting her but the ghost of what Tom had done to her.

 


	9. The Man behind The Monster

_May 1988_

Sunlight filtered through the window falling on the girl’s long, flaxen tresses like a golden rain. Gold on gold. It gave the brief, illusory sensation of her lithe, small body being bathed in a halo. As if she were an angel, a being too pure and too perfect for this world. Especially for what her father knew of the world. He shook his head to dispel the momentary bleak thoughts, which he attributed to paternal anxiety, and smiled at his daughter, as he sat in a chair by her bed.

“How about it, Elle? I would help you with everything. I’d even walk him… or her when you’re too busy with ballet practice, feed them, take them to the vet and everything.”

She sat her copy of _The Secret Garden_ in her lap and looked at her father with his very own, deep green eyes. “Dad, I told you: if you want a cat or a dog, get one.”

He smiled, aiming for nonchalance. “I’m just worried, honey. You work too hard. You’re in advanced placement at school and then there’s the ballet and the piano lessons….”

“You’re the one giving me the piano lessons,” she pointed out.

“Do you want to quit? Because I can understand if you want to have more time to have fun with your friends. I don’t want your childhood to pass you by.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Dad! You were in an advanced program at school and took piano lessons from that sweet, old lady down your street that you love so much to talk about. Did your childhood pass you by?”

“I’m not gonna win this, am I?”

“It’s two-to-one in this house, Dad. Haven’t you gotten used to being outnumbered by now?”

He chuckled and would have been quick with the retort when the sharp metallic beep of the phone interrupted their playful mock argument.

“Saved by the bell,” his daughter commented.

“Hey! I had a good comeback at the ready,” he said as he got up.

“Make sure you remember it when you come back then,” she called after him as he sprinted out of her room and down the stairs to the phone located on a table in the foyer. He picked the receiver.

“Day Manager?” said the voice on the other end.

He stiffened. “Yes.”

* * *

Jennifer woke up drowsy, with a heavy and to the literal feeling of her skin crawling. She curled in on herself, pulling the covers tighter around her, the move dislodging the nausea settling in the pit of her stomach. She was distracted from the malaise by the foreign sight of the room around her. The colors and furniture were all wrong for any bedroom she had ever had. She had never lived in a place with so much beige and cappuccino colors. There was a canopy above the bed she was currently lying on, a heavy one with a mustard-colored flower print. There was a tall, white-framed pocket window to her right from which she could see the Washington Monument. The events of the previous day slammed into her memory, putting even more strain on her upset stomach. She sat up gingerly, pressing a hand against her mouth, trying to stave off the urge to heave, and wondered idly, possibly stupidly too, considering the priority of her poor physical condition, just where she was. She couldn’t recall a thing past her getting into a car with the Concierge of Crime aka the man posing as her father.

She slid from the bed and stumbled towards the door, fighting the mortification of anyone seeing her in this state. The door was wrenched open before she could even touch the knob. The man who had told her she could call him Kenneth stood on the other side, his eyes sweeping over her from head to toe. He looked far better than she felt, considering they had spent the night before going on a bender together. He was attired in a white shirt with the two top buttons undone and dark gray slacks.

“Come on,” he said angling his head to a door to his left. “Bathroom.”

He loosely gripped her right arm and stirred her through another door, while the world and the walls whirled around her. She dropped to her knees before the toilet, as her stomach tried to climb up and throw itself out of her body through her throat and mouth. She dry-heaved and spat bile and vomit in the porcelain bowl, her embarrassment only intensifying her nausea.

She grasped onto the edge of the toilet bowl for support, as her muscles seemed to liquefy, while a firm hand held her hair back. She took a deep, steadying breath. The taste in her mouth was awful and she spat again trying to rid herself of it. A wet, blessedly cool cloth moved to her cheeks and mouth, wiping the sweat off her face.

“It's alright,” whispered a familiar baritone voice. “You’ll be alright.”

Jennifer fought to center herself against the onslaught of the splitting pain batting against the insides of her head. She heard the faucet and then the edge of a glass was pressed against the seam of her lips. She gargled, washing away the foul taste in her mouth and throat and then drank, realizing with a start just how thirsty she was. The toilet was flushed.

“Do you think you can stand now?” he asked.

She nodded weakly, feeling her stomach settle down somewhat. His hand covered her left one on the edge of the bowl, while his other arm wrapped itself around her middle, carefully drawing her up. The sound momentarily disappeared from her ears and she saw bright spots in front of her eyes. He held her up, while she panted through the new bout of dizziness. The room moved with her, as she found herself gently tilted and scooped up bridal style, a steel strong arm wrapped around her waist. She looked down on herself and saw she was still wearing the electric blue slip dress from the night before, now wrinkled beyond recognition. Feeling her cheeks heat up, she squeezed her eyes shut, half-wishing she were anywhere but there, while some other part of her just wanted to cling to him, bury her face into his chest and stay forever in the safety of his arms, away from the pain and insanity of the discoveries she had recently made about her family.

The warmth of his embrace lasted too little and she soon felt him laying her back down on the bed. She sank into the soft mattress and opened her eyes, as he was pulling the duvet over her, while she was desperately trying to look anywhere but at his face. With her head clearer, the enormity of what had happened in the bathroom began to sink in. She doubted she would ever dare look him in the eye again.

His cool, dry hand rested briefly on her forehead. “How are you feeling?”

She scoffed and buried her face in a pillow, seeking to will at least some of her shame away. The pillow smelled of sage and lemongrass. “Where am I?” she asked after a while.

“You’re in my suite at the Hay-Adams.”

She felt the bed dip as he sat on its edge. “You have a suite at the Hay-Adams?”

“It’s not under my… it’s under an assumed name.”

She lifted her gaze to the elaborate cornice above her head. “Whatever about you isn’t!”

He chuckled and repeated his previous question about how she was feeling.

“Like I was run over by an angry freight train. I guess it’s normal for a first-time hang-over.”

“This was the first time you were drunk?”

“Yeah. I mean, I had a beer here and there or a glass of wine but nothing more. I couldn’t run the risk of alcohol loosening my tongue. What if I let something about my real identity slip? As it turns out, I was right. I do run my mouth when I’m drunk.”

His hand rested over her on the coverlet, big, warm and reassuring. “You didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, Jennifer.”

Her pinkie twitched and she wrapped it around one of his finger. She turned her head and finally met his eyes with hers. “Thank you for what you… you didn’t do last night.”

His upper lip curled upwards, a crestfallen expression washing over his face. His hand went stiff over hers for a moment then he withdrew it as if burnt. “For not taking advantage of you while you were drunk and distraught? It was my pleasure,” he said dryly. His features froze into a cold, distant mask and he wasted no time in bolting to his feet.

Though her head was still pounding, she got the distinct impression she had somehow offended or wounded him or both. She was perplexed. She sat up unsteadily, fighting off a fresh bout of nausea as she did. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly.

“You need an aspirin and something for you hang-over.”

He dashed out of the room before she could add anything. He came back a minute or so later, though, carrying a tray with a pitcher of water, two tall glasses and a petrol-colored porcelain plate filled with pink, pruny pieces of something she failed to identify. She took the aspirin gratefully and drank two glasses of water with it.

“What are those?” she asked pointing to the plate he had brought in, relieved not to feel her throat so parched anymore.

“Umeboshi. Pickled sour plums. It’s a famed, trusty Japanese hang-over remedy.” He picked one with chopsticks and held it out for her to eat, which she did.

“Do they work?” she inquired after she was done grimacing.

“Not as well as being buried to the neck in wet river sand.”

“Huh?”

“Icelandic hang-over cure.”

She shook her head no when he tried to feed her another prune. The hydration had worked its magic. She was already feeling better. “You’re making this one up, aren’t you?”

“Not at all. In fact, I found that it works when you’re recovering from all kinds of benders. Alcohol doesn’t necessarily have to be a part of the proceedings.”

“You’re a treasure trove of exotic stories, aren’t you?” She accepted another plum then leaned back against a pillow which he then fluffed around her head. “You’re not at all what you seem to be.”

“I thought you already knew that.”

“That’s not what I meant. It’s not just that you’re not Raymond Reddington. You’re not the man you play, the Concierge of Crime, the big, bad criminal I’ve seen on the news. The man loyal to nobody and capable of anything. Last night… there are men out there who aren’t criminals and yet they would’ve taken advantage of me without a second’s thought. But you….” She grasped his lower arm to halt him in his tracks when he tried to back away. “And this morning…. You gave me what I needed the most both last night and this morning without asking for anything for yourself and without hesitation. Don’t say it’s because you owe me for my father because I don’t believe you anymore. It’s because this is who you are, the real you, name’s not important. You’re not a monster!”

His gaze softened and his eyes threatened to fill with tears, while a muscle tensed beneath the cotton of his shirt and she could feel it underneath her fingers.

“I can help you with my sister,” she continued.

“You mean against your sister. Why would you do that?”

“It was exciting, finding out who she was at first. I guess discovering a sibling you didn’t know you had does that to you. I believed her about you because there was no reason not to. I do have a reason now. Besides, I’ve only known her for a few days. I’ve only known you for a few days too. When it comes down to it, you’re both strangers.”

“So why choose me?”

“Because when my whole world collapsed, my sister invited me to join her revenge quest. She didn’t hold my hand… or my hair while I threw up. She didn’t offer comfort. You did!”

“Elizabeth.” He paused, his expression dimming. Something strange and hard to pin down sparkled in his eyes. “Elizabeth is a good person. She’s just forgotten that of late. She’s forgotten herself. She’s forgotten her own child. She’s disappeared in the shadow of a man who’s done nothing but hurt her. In a last act of indignity, he took her with him when he died. I know a little about what it means the let your inner darkness consume you. All she needs is to find her way home.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. My sister never made any effort to let me know her and she certainly never tried to get to know me. All I know about her is that she shot my father figure and wanted me as an ally in her war with you. Oh, and that she’s the child of the woman my father cheated on my Mom with.”

“How do you I’m not trying to recruit you too? Maybe I’m just being subtle about it. I’m famous for manipulating people and it would take little to sway you. You’re so… inexperienced.”

She wet her upper lip with her tongue. “I don’t know. Just like I don’t know what’s going on between my sister and you. This could be a lover’s spat. The more I think about it, the less I want to be caught in the middle.”

“Then allow me to take you and your mother someplace safe. Please.”

She let her hand fall from his arm. “I already told I don’t wanna go anywhere.”

“Yes, you wish to live even if it kills you,” he repeated with an annoyed frown.

She smiled, more certain than ever that her gut feeling about him was correct. “You have such white knight complex.”

* * *

The sharp metallic beep of his burner phone permeated Red’s thoughts. The tiny blue screen showed no number. He answered it, just as the doorbell rang as well. He went to answer it as he pressed the cell to his right ear.

“Day Manager?” said the voice in his ear just as he opened the door to reveal a pale and wan Samar leaning against one of the corridor’s walls.

 


	10. Before the Storm

Fiction, when we're not together  
Mistaken for a vision, something of my own creation  
Come real love, why do I refuse you?  
'Cause if my fear's right, I risk to lose you  
And if I just might wake up alone  
Bring on the night

(The XX, _Fiction_ )

 

_Six Months Ago_

Samar wobbled on her feet, making Red queasy just looking at her. Without thought he sprang into action and supported her with an arm around her shoulders. It didn’t seem to do much so he lifted her up in his arms. Her feeble state was further evidence by the lack of protestation on her side. She only emitted a pained moan. Red carried her inside and closed the door behind them with his foot.

“Is a shot of adrenaline the reason you were able to walk when you ran from the hospital?” He laid her out on the couch in Frederick Hemstead’s library and checked her pulse and forehead.

“No, atropine.”

“As good as anything,” he mumbled. “You don’t seem to be running a fever but your pulse is elevated. What were you thinking, Samar?”

“That both Israel and the US administer the capital punishment for treason.”

Something sharp pierced his chest on the left. Now he had an elevated pulse. He said nothing for starters, merely went into the bathroom, wet a towel and came to press it to Samar’s forehead. Then he seated himself in an armchair in her line of sight.

“What has Elizabeth done now?”

“It’s not her, though she is instigator so in a sense, it is her.”

“Ressler?”

“You’d think that but no.”

Red sank further into his seat. “Harold.” He felt the tell-tale muscle somersault in his left cheek.

Samar shifted on the couch, holding her towel with one hand, and winced before identifying a comfortable position from which she could meet his eyes fully. “In all the years we’ve known each you told me many stories. It’s my turn to tell you one. There is a legend going around in the international intelligence community. Most people, myself included until recently, don’t believe in it. I’ve always thought it was a clever invention on the part of an American military agency, something to increase the mystique of American spies, because let’s face it, unlike their Russian counterparts, they don’t have much of that. It’s a ghost story. Of a source or undercover operative at the heart of the criminal underworld but with connections in intelligence services, both enemy and foe, one that could provide invaluable information about criminals, traitors and double agents nobody else could reach. Over the years, this and that successful operation was attributed to intel that came from this agent few but the most paranoid even believed existed. But the rumors were persistent and the myth grew. At some point, someone—I think it was the Russians—even claimed they had discovered a codename for the myth: Day Manager.”

Red carefully schooled his features into an expressionless mask. “And what has prompted you to renounced your skepticism, Samar?”

“As long as I was sure you were Raymond Reddington, I and everyone else had no reasons to suspect you’re anything but what you appear to be: a Navy officer who one Christmas Eve left his family and country to make a lucrative living out of building a massive criminal empire. But you’re not Raymond Reddington and everything I’ve ever learnt about you proved one thing to me: you’re incapable of betraying anyone or anything you hold dear, least of all for money. It was right in front of my eyes for seven years. I can’t believe I haven’t seen it. The legend is real. The Day Manager exists. You’re him.”

“I see. To whom have you imparted this piece of knowledge?”

“To no one.”

“Not even Aram?”

“No. I’d rather he lives to hate me than die thinking the world of me. I’m sure you can relate.”

It was Red’s turn to wince. Her words had hit home. Yes, he could certainly relate. His phone rang and he picked it up apathetically.

“Your handler?” Samar asked with a raised eyebrow and a grunt.

“It’s Elizabeth.”

Samar blanched. He answered the call.

“Elizabeth,” he said with a cheer he didn’t feel. “Has something happened?”

“Does something need to happen for me to call my father?”

Red couldn’t help it. He grimaced, cold disgust washing over him. Elizabeth was becoming adept at twisting the knife and he knew she would torture him relentlessly from now on. Fine. Two could play this game.

“Of course not, sweetheart, but you caught me at a bad time. I’m entertaining a lady.”

Samar glared a warning at him. He smiled back beatifically.

“Do you mind if I call you back in the morning?” he told Elizabeth. In the loaded silence that followed, he could hear Elizabeth’s heavy breathing as well as her approaching apoplexy attack.

“What woman could be more important than your own daughter?” Elizabeth bit back dryly, her venom speaking volumes. No matter how much she hated him, she couldn’t apparently abide the thought of any woman taking precedence over her.

“Don’t pout, Elizabeth,” he said in a deliberately patronizing tone. “It’s unattractive.”

If Elizabeth hadn’t wanted to kill him before, she wanted to do it now. Of that he was absolutely sure.

“That’s inappropriate coming from my father.”

“Not more inappropriate than the moment you caught me in.” It wasn’t a lie. Elizabeth’s call couldn’t have been more inopportune given the talk he was having with Samar.

“I was gonna ask if you want us to share dinner. Maybe watch another movie together. But you can forget it now.”

Regardless of why she might have been calling initially, Elizabeth would stop at nothing to reclaim the center of his attention.

“How about we turn it into a breakfast affair?” he inquired nonchalantly.

“Wouldn’t you and your lady friend like to have breakfast in bed?”

“I would but I’m afraid she finds that habit tacky.” Again not a lie, knowing Samar.

Samar’s eyes were just about bulging out of her head. Red just winked at her conspiratorially.

“When you find the time in your busy social calendar,” Elizabeth began acidly. Suggesting she could be his second choice for anything, even breakfast, had proven to be the stroke that broke the camel’s back, just as he had anticipated. “The task force needs another case.”

“I thought you might want to take some time to recover, given the injuries you have recently suffered. Hence why I didn’t bring you anything new. Is your face still sore and bruised?”

“I’m sorry I’m not as fresh and pretty as your conquest, but unlike her, I have to work. If you can’t be bothered to get out of bed to see me, maybe you could give me a new case now over the phone.”

“Technically what Madeline’s doing for a living could be considered work,” he quipped. At face value it wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t verbatim telling her he was with Madeline. He wasn’t even implying it. He was merely making a statement of fact.

“Madeline? Madeline Pratt? Are you insane?”

“I’ve come to realize that largely depends on who you’re asking.”

“How many times has she betrayed you? Lied to you? Manipulated you?”

“Roughly the same number of times as you,” he replied casually, unable to resist, petty as it was of him.

Momentary silence reigned on the other end. “I’ll let you get back to the date,” came the chilled reply after a while. “You wouldn’t want to keep Madeline waiting when she’s planning to stab you in the back.”

Fury sparked within him in an instant. She was making the exact same plans. She was in no position to judge anyone else who had betrayed him. “In case I do receive an offer of breakfast in bed, how would you like to have a late lunch with me tomorrow?” he asked all false benevolence, while cold anger trembled in his gut.

Elizabeth hang up.

“I heard there’s a fine line between love and hate,” Samar muttered. “But you two are ridiculous!”

* * *

“Problem?” Jennifer wanted to know, lounging casually on Elizabeth’s couch.

“Temporary setback,” Liz groused, stabbing angrily at the screen of her phone as one would at somebody’s throat.

It was becoming more and more obvious to Jennifer that her half-sister was hiding a lot about the exact, mysterious nature of the relationship between her and the man pretending to be their father.

“You were lying it pretty thick with the father thing,” Jennifer remarked. “You wouldn’t want him to get suspicious.”

Liz’s head snapped up, eyes clouded. “I’ve talked like that in front of him before and he’s never liked it. In retrospect, that should’ve been my first clue. All this man did was lie to me and I ate it up without question. Sometimes I want to wring his neck. I can’t believe I let this happen to me a second time?”

“A second time?”

Liz wave it off, swift pain twisting her features.

“Who’s Madeline Pratt, anyway?” Jennifer asked innocently, deciding a change of tack was in order.

Her sister paled. “His thieving, conniving ex who has a habit of selling him off.”

“Sounds like a match made in Heaven.”

Liz just stopped or a second or so, her face chalk white and her brow furrowed in a terrible scowl.

“What? It does,” Jennifer defended. “You seem to care an awful lot who he sleeps with.”

“I don’t,” Liz all but shouted, her frown deepening if that was possible.

“Then what are you worried about? That she might destroy him before you get a chance?”

* * *

Alone in her rental car, Jennifer pulled out her burner phone and texted Kenneth.

_You sure know how to get under my sister’s skin._

She paused and added quickly, before she could change her mind.

_Since she blew you off, how about breakfast, lunch, dinner, a snack, coffee tomorrow?_

* * *

Red let Samar’s remark slide. It wasn’t insightful, he couldn’t deny it, but not the in the way Samar had meant it. He and Elizabeth did have a love and hate relationship. He did all the loving and Elizabeth did all the hating. He shifted in his seat, speedily bringing his attention where it belonged—to the urgent situation at hand. It came easily. He was accustomed to self-denial and hiding his true feelings. That was the true mask he wore. Not that of Raymond Reddington, but that of a man who never felt, never hurt and never had to think about anything that didn’t have strategic importance.

“What did Harold do?” he asked Samar.

“He went to see the person who, I suspect, taught you to use charm as a weapon.”

Red barely suppressed a smirk in time.

* * *

Glass of scotch in hand, Red stood by the window of Frederick Hemstead’s library looking a one of his favorite views in the whole world. His mind was not on the poetry of the rosy dawn light breaking through the lushly green foliage but on sharing this very vista with Elizabeth in the early, happier days of their acquaintance. His phone with Jennifer’s invitation burnt a hole in his pocket. He drained his glass.

“Raymond?”

He turned. Dembe was in the doorway.

“Did Samar arrive to the hospital alright?” he asked of his brother.

Dembe only nodded, his eyes grave. “What are you going to do, Raymond?”

“The only thing I can do.” He sank between the couch’s cushions, took out his phone and handed it to Dembe.

Dembe gave Jennifer’s message a cursory glance. “There’s no harm in loving someone who might one day love you back, my friend.” The last two words were heavy with meaning.

Red understood exactly what Dembe had wanted to say. His real name. Their gaze met. Dembe gave him back the burner.

“I’ll go make coffee, Raymond. Join me when you can.”

When Dembe left, Red got up again and went to one of the book shelves. He lifted a small, indigo velvet box and opened it. Inside there was a tiny, aqua blue fish figure made out of hand-spun Murano glass. Last he had been in Paris, he had been too caught up in Elizabeth and the endless complications she brought about into his life to have the time to visit Josephine. He had been barely able to spare a few hours to rest his soul beneath the Winged Victory, where they had met. He contemplated the fragile, molded shard of glass and Dembe’s words. Locked inside the forever sleeping Josephine resided a great love for him. A love the likes of which the man who was not Raymond Reddington thought was perpetually inaccessible to him. He had been remiss in caring for that love. He opened what looked like a perfectly innocuous leather edition of _The Count of Monte Cristo._ The book, however, hid a secret compartment. He took an unmarked, metallic vial from it and swallowed two of the pills inside.

 


	11. Cry Havoc

Hear the devil callin, hear the devil callin’   
When I hear the devil callin' God will pay him for what he's do  
I can't stop the Dogs of War, I can't stop the Dogs of War   
See the fields burnin, see the feilds burnin'   
When I see the feels burnin’ cause hell is coming through  
I can't stop the Dogs of War, I can't stop the dogs of war   
Feel the river risin’, feel the river risin’  
When I feel the river risin’ devil coming up from you  
I can't stop the Dogs of war   
(Blues Saraceno, _Dogs of War_ )

  


_Six Months Ago_

Liz stood by here kitchen window with a steaming mug of coffee in her hand. She didn’t have the stomach for breakfast, even if she had had the inclination or the proficiency to took cook. She didn’t have to, either. The apartment was empty and filled with silence. She didn’t have much of a view but she could still perceive the rich, crimson light of sunrise falling over the city, making it look as if it were on fire. She hadn’t slept much. She wasn’t sleeping much since she had recovered from her coma. Her nights were plagued with nightmares. She often dreamed of blood, of Navarro and his men, even of that scumbag, Tom Connolly. Of bodies disintegrating in acid. The dead were always with her. Every life she had taken haunted her. The dead would allow her no respite.

She poured what was left of her coffee down the drain and went to get ready for work.

* * *

Red waited for the familiar black Subaru Forester to leave before embarking on the now paved forest road to red-brick farmhouse. The roses at the front, most of them American beauties, were in bloom. Four white pillars rose from the ruddy limestone of the entryway. The key was in its place under one of the potted plants by the front door. He walked across the polished hardwood floor to the kitchen, where time seemed to have stood still. The spacious, sunlit room bore the same flower pattern drapes, cherry cabinets and tiled backsplash. He crept inside carefully. The last time he had been here, he had to dodge a stake knife thrown at his head. He found whom he was looking for by the restaurant size, stainless steel fridge, holding a delicate, white porcelain cup.

“What are you doing here?” was his only greeting. “I thought he had agreed thirteen years ago that given my high profile after my promotion, it would be best if we never saw each other again.”

He smiled sardonically, looking her up and down. She was as unchanged as the room she stood in: the same blond, long bob, pale lipstick, piercing blue eyes, ecru skirt suit and matching heels. The massive, emerald-cut sapphire of her engagement ring loomed over the thick platinum band adjacent to it.

“Hello, Willy,” he said genially. “It’s been far too long. You look well. Yes, I would like a cup of coffee, thank you.”

“I reserve my manners for those who let me know their cover’s been blown,” she fired back without missing a beat.

“My cover hasn’t been blown.”

“So there isn’t an entire FBI task force out there who knows you’re not Raymond Reddington?”

Red hid a grimace at the last moment. “What did Harold tell you?”

“With words, nothing. He spouted some awkward, thinly veiled apropos about wanting everything on Raymond Reddington that didn’t make it onto official record. He thinks I work for the Bureau of Naval Personnel, after all. His poorly concealed nervousness and his only ironed at the front shirt spoke volumes, though. He’s not living at home because he’s having marital problems again. So his wife must be cheating on him once more. No surprises there! They’re two strangers sharing adult children who don’t need them anymore. A former Navy golden boy should be more adept at hiding his private issues at work. Frankly, I’m embarrassed for us.”

“We picked him together,” he pointed out. “Specifically because he was vulnerable.”

Giving up on her pouring him any coffee, he reached into the cabinet where he knew her maid was keeping the cups, extracted one and made himself a double-shot of espresso using her vintage, marvelous, Italian made machine on the counter. Though she was at home, she was in full work mode, which meant she cut nobody any slack. He plied his coffee with several cubes of brown sugar and stirred. Thankfully, he knew where everything was in her kitchen.

“Right now, however, Harold’s marital situation has no bearing on our larger issue,” he added in as mild of a tone as he could muster. Harold couldn’t even begin to guess the rabbit hole in which he had plunged himself and his people by thoughtlessly pursuing Elizabeth’s vendetta against him.

Willy focused her famously icy glare onto him. He was instantly transported back in time to back when he had been the naive, idealistic 21-year old, Annapolis wash-out she had recruited. Back then he had also had a wife and a newborn. Something twinged painfully on the left side of his chest. Then to his surprise her gaze softened. The wrinkles of her aristocratic face became more obvious. He was reminded that she had a good ten years on him.

“These people are not your friends, Day Manager. I know you wish to think so but it’s simply not true. You’re a convenience to them. They use you to mop up their messes and when you’re done, they vent out their personal and professional frustrations onto you. As if you are their very own pet criminal.”

“You have someone inside the Post Office,” he realized.

“It’s only common sense. Besides, so do you.”

“I can handle this, Willy. I’ve had close calls before and I’ve always come out on top and without so much as a whisper of exposure.”

“That was because you weren’t personally involved so you could think clearly. When was the last time you had your head on straight? It certainly wasn’t when you thought Masha Rostova had died. I distinctly remember you vanishing for days. Need I remind of the whole Kathryn Nemec debacle? The whole op was nearly blown to smithereens. You’ve lost control and what’s worse, you can’t even see it.”

He calmly set his cup on the counter and took a few calculated steps in her direction. “I’ve lost and can’t even see it? How long have I been Raymond Reddington, Willy? How long have I slept on rocks, in the desert, in caves, in cars, in hotel beds next to women I had just laid back and thought of England with… pardon the mission, while you slept peacefully next to your husband with your children down the hallway? Have many years have I been out there, in the cold, with no back-up, no logistic support, no handler, while you had plausible deniability and a scintillating career in the light? You bought a farm in Virginia while I haven’t been home in thirty years. Do you have any idea what I’ve done to preserve the secret? All the lives I’ve took? Because they knew too much, got too close? Because it was what was expected of the Concierge of Crime? Because they were traitors or part of a conspiracy that could never be proven and hence they could have never been convicted in open? Because it was my job? Because our government doesn’t commit assassinations but it certainly employs people to do so? What about the lives I’ve destroyed? The secret allies I’ve supplied with weaponry when no legitimate weapons manufacturers could afford to openly? How many wars I’ve helped prolonged? Can you even fathom what is like to do all of this with a conscience? So don’t tell me I’ve lost control! Because if I had, I would’ve gone mad years ago. I would’ve betrayed our cause. I would’ve taken the persona of Raymond Reddington for my own and enjoyed the money and the power it made me. What could you have done then? Send someone to kill me? You would’ve have had to stand in one very long line first. Remember I broke into the Cabal? I could’ve crowned myself king right there and then. How would that have been for loss of control?”

Something trembled in her eyes. A crack in the famously arctic facade. “I send people to death every day and when I don’t, I send them to hell on earth… like I once did with you. And you brought a demon back home with you and it killed your entire family and stole your life. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about it.” She leveled a stony gaze onto him. “I’ve always been adamant about professional boundaries and we’ve never been exactly friends. Perhaps in your case I should’ve made an exception. Nobody in espionage history even attempted what you pulled off. And I left you with no support on our side, with nothing to remind you you’re not Raymond Reddington. It’s not surprise then that in time you’ve clung to a Fata Morgana as a reminder of your humanity?”

“Is that what you think Elizabeth is? A Fata Morgana? A delusion I manufactured to keep myself human. An image of an oasis with water and shadowy palm trees in the scorched desert I am transversing?”

“If I’m wrong, then tell me who you think she is? Because Elizabeth Keen doesn’t exist. She’s Masha Rostova and no amount of denial on your part will ever change that. The woman you built up in your mind as Elizabeth… is a figment of your imagination. I had someone keep an eye on her during her recent trip to Alaska. I’ve been keeping this here in anticipation of a visit from you sometime in the more or less distant future.” She moved to a drawer below one of the sinks, removed the box of utensils from it and lifted the fake bottom to take out a thick manila envelope, which she handed to him. “You’ll remember the method she used as that of the Stewmaker. You saved her from him back when you thought he was one of the cleaners who had escaped from your house the night your family was murdered, didn’t you? It seems she understood her abduction by him as a teaching experience.”

Red put the pictures back in the envelope. “I know Elizabeth is capable of cold-blooded murder. This is nothing new.”

“Tell that to the twitch in your left cheek.”

“Are these the only copies?” he asked coolly, tapping a finger on the edge of the wrapper.

“Yes. I don’t need to hold anything in her past against her. There are always new crimes for her to commit tomorrow.” She sighed. “Have you ever wondered where the guilt ends and where the love begins?”

“I paid my debt to Elizabeth years ago.”

“I’m not talking about what you owe her. I believe you see her as an embodiment of everyone you hurt, killed or otherwise ruined these pas three decades. You said it yourself. It’s a terrible thing to do such things while still in possession of a conscience. At some point, you must’ve felt the need to punish yourself.”

“Do you want to know the truth, Willy? Truth is I, myself, am not sure. I’ve puzzled and pondered this every each way… and I still don’t know. You said I’m not thinking straight anymore. The trouble is I am. I’m perfectly capable of being objective about Elizabeth. That’s what frightens me. I stopped holding onto any illusions the moment I discovered the cold, calculated manner in which she had faked her death. I don’t need any stack of photographs to prove to me she’s not the innocent angel of salvation I had naively and inexplicably once hoped to find in her. I already know. I’ve known for years. I know the only light in the perpetual night in which I live is Dembe, my one friend. He’s my only salvation, because he sees the man and not the useful monster, the attack dog ready to kill on command and that you can put down with words and emotional wounds when he’s no longer needed. I must’ve made the decision to leave, to cut the cord thousands of times. At every new stab, I told myself this was the last straw, the camel’s back was broken, but then a look, a smile, a gesture, no matter how small, on her side would suffice to sway me. Or a new threat would emerge and she or her daughter, whom she would rather give to Scottie Hargrave than let me anywhere near, would be in danger… and just like that, I would find myself staying.”

Willy’s countenance was not unsympathetic. “What you’re describing isn’t love. It’s addiction. You switched the opium for her.”

“It would explain why I started using again the second I thought she was dead.”

“What can I say? I’m wise beyond my years.”

“You’re seventy-two.”

“How did you find out? That’s classified information. Neither of us are as young as the day we met.”

“You wound me, Willy.”

“I should! I’m a better shot than you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, I never missed twice with a head-shot. So the biggest money is on yes.” She paused, considering him carefully. “You have six months to make the breach go away. Not a moment more. After that, I’m stepping in whether you like it or not. And before you say anything, I’m not doing it out of spite but because by then I will have to. For my sake, yours and that of the mission…. And Kenneth?”

He started. It was different when she said it. He had used his real first name as part of several aliases as a way of hiding in plain sight but in her mouth, it had power. Aside from Dembe, she was the only other person alive who knew that was his real name.

“If you feel any amount of guilt over not telling Masha Rostova the whole truth from the get-go, don’t! It’s most likely the only reason we’re both still alive and there’s still a mission to speak of.”

He desperately wanted to contradict her but was well aware he couldn’t. If Elizabeth had known, she wouldn’t have blown his cover a long time ago. “Speaking of the mission, we have a problem… another problem. Elizabeth might have left Agnes with Scottie Hargrave out of her own free will but it doesn’t mean Scottie hasn’t subtly nudged her in that direction. Legally she can only control half of Halcyon with its precious Grey Matters secrets. The other half belongs to Harold and they’ve been wrestling for the whole for ages. As the only offspring of the only, now deceased Hargrave child, Agnes is the legal heir to the entirety of Halcyon.”

Willy scoffed. “So your obsession handed Scottie control of the whole of Halcyon on a shiny silver platter, which puts our resident gold-digger into the unique strategic position of taking advantage of the havoc you wreaked on the Cabal in order to reconstruct it in her image. You see why I’m slightly concerned over your involvement with Masha Rostova.”

“Alright so I could’ve chosen my fixation more carefully. I’m not perfect!”

“You can make it up with the plan you undoubtedly have for Scottie Hargrave.”

He grinned.

* * *

On her way to her office, Willy stopped to talk briefly to her assistant and give him a set of instruction. Then she went in and sat behind her desk. She glanced to the lone white orchid on her window sill and cleared her throat. Then she picked her secure satellite phone and placed a call. When she spoke, she used just a hint of her long-lost Georgian accent. The people she was lulling into a false sense of security didn’t have to know she could speak a perfectly standardized English. She had always found the subtle yet constant reminder of her Southern charm to work wonders on those she was seeking to manipulate.

“Scottie, how are you, my darling? This is Admiral Corinne Wilkes speaking,” she said into her phone, her name a redundancy. Scottie knew who she was from the voice and accent alone. Thankfully Scottie had no idea what she was.

* * *

Red drove for a while before stopping on the side of the road in order to make a phone call. “Samar? How are you feeling after your little excursion?”

“Ready to do jazzercise. What did she say?”

“We or more precisely I have six months to fix this.”

“Did the Wicked Witch of Western Espionage really relent?”

“She can’t exactly replace me, can she now?”

“You’re the one who spread that nickname, didn’t you?”

He only laughed.

“Just out curiosity, what’s your real name?”

“Rumpelstiltskin,” he replied matter-of-factually.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ever since I saw the trailer for the Murphy Brown reboot, I've been imagining Candice Bergen as Corinne 'Willy' Wilkes.


	12. Fallen Angel

_Six Months Ago_

He laid the orange blossoms by the old tombstone which was half overrun with ivy. The flowers resembled so much like her small, modest wedding bouquet, his heart clenched painfully. Next he placed the yellow zinnias on the adjacent stone. There was no doubt as to whom was resting in those two graves that were left purposefully unattended so that they would look abandoned should anyone come snooping. He inclined his head and closed his eyes, saying a prayer to a God he had long since felt like he had the right to address. But his wife and daughter were innocent of the blood he had spilled since he had been without them. They deserved prayers. They deserved Heaven. They deserved more than to seem forgotten.

“I’m sorry, girls,” he whispered. “It’s been far too long.”

The larger headstone was a plain granite one. It bore a classic inscription: the name in capital letters and below it, _beloved mother and wife_. The smaller one had a white marble angel wrapping nacreous wings around it, the statue’s forehead pressed on its arms folded atop of the cold stone, as if it had rested its head on it in mourning. The letters carved into it had a slight Gothic flair to them: _Elizabeth Scott –_ _She is now dancing for the angels._

* * *

_January 1990_

_Kenneth paced up and down his superior’s office, while she sat imperially behind her imposing desk wearing one of her trademark pale-colored skirt suits. Deep in a recess of his mind, a small portion of him recalled his professionalism and knew she was only doing her job trying to salvage what was left of an operative she had recruited and trained. The rest of him didn’t care. He stopped and ran a hand through his unkempt hair. He couldn’t remember his last haircut anymore than he could remember the last time he had slept, eaten or showered. His palms landed heavily on the matte surface of her desk._

“ _You said your job’s to send high-skilled men and women into battle,” he rasped. “It’s not true. You know it. I know it. We all know it. You send us into a hell of lies and deceit and the last time I went there, I brought a demon back home with me and it killed my family.”_

“ _The investigation is still ongoing,” she said calmly._

_His hands turned into fists. “We both know who did this, Willy.”_

_Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “That’s Captain or Sir to you, Mr. Scott. Last I checked, your personal tragedy didn’t make me any less of your direct superior.”_

“ _What happened to my wife and daughter was anything but personal,” he spat glaring at her._

_Her expression softened as if on command. It probably was. “Kenneth,” she said in a gentler tone. “Go home.”_

“ _I don’t have a home anymore.”_

“ _What do you want from me then?”_

“ _Raymond Reddington’s head on an extremely sharp stick.”_

_She sighed. “We both have the same wish. Nevertheless I can’t let one of my own people commit acts of vigilantism against still respect Navy officers.”_

“ _Vigilantism?” He scoffed. “You think me killing Reddington would be justice? No, Captain! It wouldn’t even come close. I could wait for the next Christmas Eve and go kill the wife he betrayed before his country and his innocent daughter and it still wouldn’t make us close to even.”_

“ _I repeat: go home… such as it is.”_

_He pressed his fingers against his throbbing temples. “I can’t go home. Not without doing something we’d all regret. The world I live in is one where no hopes remains and no love seems possible. You asked me what I want from you. I want you to tell me that the only justice my wife and daughter will see won’t be me grabbing a gun and running amok with it.”_

_She met his eyes steadily. “It won’t. There’s another angle from which we can approach this.”_

“ _What angle?”_

“ _The Russian one.”_

* * *

_Six Months Ago_

As he walked away from the George Washington Cemetery in Takoma Park, the man who would be Raymond Reddington sensed a sugary scent of freshly baked goods that warmed him to the core. Following his unfailing nose, he discovered the little shop with its gaudy colored firm and unimpressive glass door. Before going in, he pulled out his burner and dialed.

“Jennifer, hello,” he said once he got an answer. “How would you like to have brunch?”

* * *

Jennifer bit into her pain au chocolat with obvious relish, a look of pleasure crossing her face. They were sitting before an elegant brunch setting in an elegant yet discreet, French style restaurant he liked. The place was a far cry from the unassuming pastry shop he had come across in Takoma Park and from which he had a brown bag in his car.

“Mmm, this is delicious,” Jennifer enthused with a grin. She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin, a smudge of bright red staining the white tissue. Jennifer was sporting a more polished look than when he had first met her. She was still wearing jeans but had paired them with a flower printed shirt, her hair was a mass of this time artfully messy curls around her head, and she was wearing lipstick—a lot of it. Quite possibly mascara too. It was very becoming on her.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it,” he said before returning to his oranais.

“You sure know how to get under my sister’s skin,” she remarked.

He raised an eyebrow trying to keep his expression as neutral as he could. “Do I now?”

Her snort of laughter was rather undignified. “I think you know you do.” She paused for another bite. “There’s much about you she isn’t telling me, is there?”

“She gets that from me.”

“Ah,” she muttered and sipped from her cappuccino. “This is definitely not the powder supermarket stuff.”

“I should hope not.”

“It’s not that bad. You always get those chewy chunks that are left at the bottom of the mug and are fun to hunt down with a spoon. Anyhow, who’s Madeline Pratt?”

“Interesting segue.”

“I was not aiming for subtlety.”

“Obviously.”

“Is she your girlfriend?”

“Absolutely not and she would say we’re too old for that term or that at least, I am.”

She picked up the last of her pain au chocolat regarding him speculatively. “So you’re single?”

He laughed despite the bitterness slipping into his heart like an enemy would in the dead of the night.

* * *

Liz stormed out of the Post Office wrapped in her leather jacket as if in armor. She was in a foul mood. The mix of paperwork and her previous sleeplessness night made for an awful combination. Reddington’s absence and her anger at him weren’t helping either. Speaking of the devil, the devil—whoever he was—leaned casually against his sleek, dark Mercedes. Liz pursued her lips together and scowled in his direction. He was dressed all in black: black pants, black jacket, black fedora and black shirt opened at the neck with no tie. His head was tilted to the side and he affected one of those charming smiles of his for which she would never fall again. Clenching her teeth, she strolled towards him. If she was going to use his feelings for her against him, she needed to be able to play on them. Outbursts like that of the morning were counterproductive. She needed him to think her oblivious to his sick charade.

As she drew closer he held up a brown pain bag. “Elizabeth,” he greeted. “I’ve discovered the most enticing pecan butter bear claws. I brought you a few as well. It would change your vision of American-born pastry forever.”

She took the bag from him, though it was about the last thing she wished to do. “Thanks.”

“Try one,” he encouraged.

Liz’s stomach rebelled at the thought. Still she opened the bag and extracted one of the sweet smelling pastries and bit into it. She chewed it mechanically without giving much thought to how it tasted.

He was regarding her expectantly. “Delightful, isn’t it?”

She nodded over a mouthful of buttery dough, which she then made herself swallow. “As good as this is, I need a case more.”

He chuckled but it didn’t go all the way to his oddly dull eyes. “Io fei gibbeto a me de le mie case.”

Liz frowned. “What?”

“I remember a lecture I once attended at the Studiolo in the Palazzo Vechio in Florence. The professor is an old client of mine.” He chuckled this time with real warmth. “A most curious fellow. He was speaking on Dante Alighieri, more specifically on the parallels the author of the Divine Comedy draws between the suicide by hanging of Judas Iscariot and that of a contemporary, Pier della Vigna. At the end, as della Vigna has caused his own destruction, sinking deeper and deeper into his crime, those are the final words he utters: _I made my own home be my gallows.”_

“What’s his crime?” Liz wanted to know.

“Treason.”

“Is that what the blacklister did?”

“To begin with. Do you remember what I once told you about the problem with drawing lines in the sand?”

“That with a breath of air they disappear,” he parroted back amazed at how fresh the memory of that evening was and a more than a little bit unsettled. Unsettled by the choices she had made with the Frederick Barnes case and their long reaching consequences and unsettled by herself and her more recent actions. She suppressed a shudder and made herself meet his eyes but he had already looked away.

“The more the time passes, the more I’m starting to think some lines shouldn’t disappear.” He turned her face towards her. “Ask me.”

“What am I supposed to ask you?”

“The question you haven’t even thought of at the beginning of our acquaintance. The question you’ve realized now. The only question that matters.”

Liz felt they were teetering perilously on an edge about to fall into a bottomless abyss. She was armed and they were in the closed back alley that lead to the second entrance to the Post Office. It was late in the afternoon, nearly dusk, and they were all alone, the sound of the close-by streets a dim murmur in the distance. She carefully placed the bag he had given her on the hood of his car, surreptitiously checking if Dembe was behind the wheel as usual. He wasn’t. She really shouldn’t have eaten anything from the imposter.

She locked eyes with him but his gaze was hard to read. It occurred to her all of the sudden that she knew nothing about this man. Everything she had learnt about him in all the years they had worked together was a lie, even his very name. He stood before her, tall and hulking, dressed in black like an omen of death, dark, unknown and utterly dangerous. Armed too. He was never not armed. All the things she had gotten used to ignoring or believing they could never apply to her came tumbling into her mind at once. This man was the Concierge of Crime. This was the only moniker she needed to know. The man was capable of anything and loyal only to his pocket. She had seen him kill in cold blood, maim and torture. She had seen how ruthless he could be. Yet she had always thought he would never hurt her, that he only meant to protect in his own misguided ways, that he loved her. But if everything about him was a lie, how could she be sure even of that? What if his actions towards her had only been part of one of the elaborate ploys he concocted all the time? Her blood went cold. She had been underestimating him for too long, threatening others with him, blind to the fact that he embodied menace, that it could be just as easily turned on her.

“What’s the only question that matter?” she asked coolly wondering if she should be reaching for her gun.

He enunciated each of his next three words in a low, raspy tone that could be a threat as much as it could be means of ensnaring. “Who am I?”

Liz’s entire world tilted. She swallowed hard. He knew! Her colleagues were only a phone call away but she would waste precious seconds reaching for her cell. It was more than he needed. She was well aware. She had seen how swift and deadly he could be. She looked into his cobra like eyes. She really should be more afraid.

“Who are you?” she asked slowly and over a dry throat.

“Not a tame lion.”

She understood his reference then. _I made my own home be my gallows._ Once he had thought of her as his home or at least, his way there. Figuring she had nothing to lose, she added: “What’s your name?”

He smiled thinly. “You may want to pull your gun now, Lizzie.”

The nickname took her aback. It had been so long. Something in her heart, a string that had been dormant for too long, vibrated halfway between pain and elation. She only hesitated once before pulling her service weapon and holding it between them like a shield. However, her finger didn’t descend to the trigger but stayed along the barrel. He didn’t move a single muscle, eyes fixed on her.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Major kudos to anyone getting the reference. And no, I don't mean the one to Dante. :)


	13. Fire!

_Oh, what it takes out of me to lay by your side_  
Oh, how it aches and it aches  
You make me wanna die  
I gotta kill you, my love  
I gotta kill you, my love  
Oh, what it takes out of me to lay by your side 

(Meg Myers – _Monster)_

  


_Six Months Ago_

Red had anticipated Elizabeth drawing her gun and holding it on him. Yet when he saw the brisk and purposeful gesture, his heart broke all over again. He wondered how many times Elizabeth could splinter it before he would be left with no heart at all. Every time, however, he was surprised. Perhaps he possessed more soul than he had thought. He was quick to keep any and all anguish off his face, giving her only his best coolly menacing facade he had perfected in decades of being one of the most feared men on the surface of the planet. Elizabeth might have called him a monster many times but she had never actually encountered the dark, utterly dangerous being about to devour anything in sight that he carried contained within himself. It was freeing to let go at long last. Apparently he had been holding onto far more rancor and anger towards her than he had expected. Today was a day of wonders, it seemed.

“Shoot,” he said in a low, gravely voice, his eyes drilling into hers. He took one step in her direction.

Her finger was still not moving to the trigger, though her jaw was clenched in tension, her lips pale and her eyes rapidly filling with anger.

“This is what you want to do, isn’t it?” he taunted. “I’m the monster that consumed your life, your perfect, idyllic family life built on a castle of lies by your willingness to be deceived and the man who did nothing but betray you.”

Fury blazed into her cold, bright blue eyes. “You killed Tom,” she bit out through gritted teeth.

He saw a tremor run through her finger. The knuckle whitened. Still the trigger remained untouched. He took another step towards her. “No,” he groused. “I rushed to save you both, no matter how much I wanted to tear him apart with my bare hands. Before that I made an effort to be civil to him, to offer him sound advice he was too reckless and conceited to take. All for you. Regardless of much I hated him. Before you say anything, no, it wasn’t over my secret or the fact that he turned against me and took my enemy’s money to spy on you. I hated him for all the reasons you once hated him too. For all the reasons I told you to imagine and live a life without him. I hated him because he took your innocence away, because he lied to you, made you think you’re unworthy of being loved without being hurt, because he put his hands on you, because he hit you and held a gun to your head, because he made you feel filthy with every touch. And above all, I hated him because he warped you in his image, turned your inner fire into cold embers, your softness into cruelty, your compassion into indifference, your volatility into calculated deceit and your strength into murderous rage. I hated him for what he did to you and I let him live so you would hate me less. That I regret. I should’ve taken my role as your sin eater to the bitter end, accepted your loathing and killed him long before Garvey’s knife freed you of him. Long before he had one last chance to put you in danger and lie to you.”

A shadow passed over her face. Something of what he had said had gotten to her. Deep down inside, a portion of her, no matter how obscure and tiny, recognized the truth of his words. Her whole hand on the gun shook. Only once. Her eyes flickered. “He didn’t lie to me, manipulate or hurt me any more than you did.” She was holding onto her wrath for dear life. “Than you still do.”

He took another step towards her, though now it was her who was getting to him. “I have never lied to you,” he repeated for the umpteenth time, willing her to believe him.

Her small smile was cruel. “How would I know? You lied to all of us, to the entire task force. You lied about your own name, about who you are.”

“I lie to everyone,” he pointed out reasonably. “Everyone but you! I may not tell you everything. I’ve warned you about that from the start. I did tell you, however, that everything about me is lie.”

“Is that supposed to make up for everything? You let me believe you’re my father. Why? To get close to me? What am I to you? Some sort of sick experiment? A bug you’ve pinned down and amuse yourself by ripping off its wings?”

He sighed in exasperation, though her words had wounded him deeper than he could admit. “I couldn’t tell you why you and Cooper thought you’d discovered was wrong without an explanation that would have put you in far greater danger than you can imagine.”

“That excuse has outstayed its welcome,” she fired back sharply. All her knuckles turned the color of chalk, as she visibly squeezed her weapon tighter.

His exasperation grew. He took a smaller step in her direction. “Remember when I showed you the map of the Cabal and the system that spawned like cancer around it? You didn’t take me seriously. The world doesn’t cease to exist just because you shove your fingers in your ears and hum as loudly as you can. The danger to you is still there. Each time I warned you and each time you ignored me, exposing yourself a little more in the process. It’s not just the bad guys who are after you this time but also the good guys. It may have taken me years to accept but I can’t protect you from everyone any more than I can save you from yourself.”

“I don’t need your protection.”

“Since when? I have an empire and yet it’s often a chore to keep you alive. How well do you expect to fair against the entire world? As well as you did against Berlin? Against the Cabal? Against the woman you chose to leave your daughter with? Against Kirk when you ran from me straight into his path?”

“If there’s danger in my life, it’s because you brought it,” she snapped. “You poison everything you touch. Everything around you turns rotten, everyone around you dies.”

The dagger had pierced its intended target: his heart. Still he took a step closer to her. The distance between them had been reduced to one foot. “If that’s true, then why don’t you end it right here right now? If I’m the monster who ruined your life and brought irrevocable danger into it, then pull the trigger. Drive the danger away. Save yourself from me. Shoot!”

Liz glared at him, as he stood still, still brandishing her gun, finger still not on the trigger, her face livid. Hostility swirled in the baby blue pools of her eyes and animated the air between. He drew even closer.

“Shoot, Elizabeth, because if you don’t, I’ll take the gun from you and you won’t have another chance.”

“Don’t come any close,” she warned, her voice raspy, her gaze hardening.

He ignored her warning and slid ever nearer. “End it. You said it yourself: I’m a lying snake, a killer, a psychopath, while you’re an FBI agent. You’re well within your rights. Nobody would blame you. I’m Number Four on FBI’s Most Wanted List. They won’t even formulate charges. Not only will you walk away from this, but you’ll be free. I’ll be out of your life for good.” He paused to inch himself even closer.

“Don’t…..”

“You would take revenge for my posing as your father, for Tom, for Sam, for Kate, for all things you think I’ve done. For all the things I did do.” Another step. “This is what you want, don’t you? This is what you wanted for a long time. Discovering I’m an imposter only clenched it. You want to end me so end it! Fire!”

“I will….” He finger moved lower but it didn’t quite make it to the trigger, trembling slightly as it did.

“I cast a giant shadow over your life you can’t seem to shake,” he went on, purposefully baiting her. “I’ve never told you the truth you wanted. I dragged you into my world, into darkness and I’m not letting you see the light. It’s because of me you can’t have the life and family you want. It’s because of me you constantly have to look over your shoulder. Because of my obsession, of my agenda you don’t trust. Because I trampled every boundary you drew. You want out. You want to make me pay. This is your chance, Elizabeth. You won’t get a second one, I assure you. So go ahead. Shoot!”

Elizabeth’s finger hovered over the trigger. “I told you not to come any closer!”

“When have I listened?” he asked wryly and illustrated his point with another step towards her.

“Stop,” she all but yelled.

“This is how you punish me,” he uttered as calmly as he could muster.

She was so pale, still bruised, yellow and purplish blemishes still marring the perfect porcelain of her skin around her swollen, crystal clear, blue eye. She was painfully thin too. Sharpened like a knife’s edge until nothing was left but a wisp of fury, despair and confusion. Her pain was evident on his face. His heart bled again. This time not because of her but for her. All his anger, the stab of betrayal, reason and the threat to his mission dwindled and grew thin. He vacillated and very nearly took a step back when a sharp intake of breath on her part halted him in his tracks. In a blink of an eye he saw it: her inner fight solidifying into resolution. Her finger curled around the trigger. He froze, disbelief paralyzing him. He had riled her up intentionally in an attempt to gauge how serious the problem she posed was, if she truly was ready to go all the way and kill him. Still he had never expected his test to have this outcome. He had never quite brought himself to believe she would really shoot him. The shock poured ice into his veins, rooting him to the spot, incapable of moving to take cover, unable to do anything to save himself.

He was only two steps away from her when the bullet left. It swished through the air and missed him by a wide margin. At the last second her hand had moved to the side and she had aimed away from him. A dry, hopeless cry was wrenched from her chest, her eyes far too bright. She lowered the gun.

“I can’t,” she said weakly. A dry cackle followed the scream. There was surprise in the sound. “I don’t know why… I can’t….”

He closed the distance between them and pried the weapon from her unresistant fingers. The gaze she cast him tore at him. She expected no mercy. He set the gun on the hood of his car next to the greasing bag of take-out pastry he had brought for her. He cupped her face, while his free arms wrapped securely around her waist.

“Who are you?” she asked dully, confusion written on her features.

“It’s alright, Elizabeth,” he assured her.

She shook her head no and placed her palms on his chest to push him away. He relented and let her go.

“I don’t know who you are.”

He looked at her in the same tender, caring fashion he had always reserved for her. “Yes, you do. You’ve always known. I’ve always tried to show you what few have seen: the real me. The name has no bearing upon that. What could a name, even a real one, clear up for you? What has knowing your actual name is Masha Rostova changed about you? Has it made you feel any less like Elizabeth?”

“You’re rationalizing. You’re doing what you’ve always done: changing the subject, muddling waters, talking your way out of telling me the truth.”

“The truth has never been more lethal than it is now, Elizabeth.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You never do.”

“That’s because whenever I start to, you do something that makes trusting you impossible.”

“Elizabeth, have you ever truly believed I’m your father?”

“I… I guess… a part of me wanted to.”

“Why?”

“What does it matter? You’re not my father!”

“As I recall, I’ve been telling you that since early in our acquaintance.”

“You’ve been telling me a lot of things, none of them true. Just for once….” She raised her fists and launched herself towards him.

She had done that before but this time he decided for different outcome. He intercepted her. His hands grasped her wrist firmly halting her forward momentum, careful though not to squeeze hard enough to leave bruises behind. He merely held her at bay.

“Let me go,” she commanded, her eyes scintillating, their shade darkened nearly all the way to violet in her ire. One chestnut-colored hair lock had fallen into her face.

He released her. The instant he did, her right hand came up again. He ducked his head, fully expecting to be scratched but then her fingers dug into his shoulder through his jacket and shirt. He tensed, not sure what she was aiming for. A second later, he felt her mouth on his—hot and demanding, her teeth digging painfully into his lower lip. This was the worst idea any of them could have had as well as a sick parody of his secret, most fervent dream of her. His hands came to rest on the leather of her jacket at her hips intent on pushing her off but it was her who broke the kiss and stepped back.

“I…..” Her lips were now blood red. “We… we’re both insane.”

He couldn’t argue with her on that.  


 


	14. Rules of Engagement

 

It’s a wide ocean  
And a tight emotion  
And our homes are chosen  
Yet still we’re all broken   
(Hollow Coves, _Home_ )

  


_Now_

When the red light of the camera in the corner went off, Liz’s heart leapt in her chest. Hope blossomed within her, even though the guards were shackled her cuffed arms to the table and pinned her cuffed legs to the floor. Then they left her alone. Hope, however, dissolved to disappointment when the door opened again, this time to admit in Admiral Corinne Wilkes. She was dressed in a lime skirt suit, her lipstick so pale, it was nearly white. Those cold, superior blue eyes were filled with distaste. She settled a thick manila envelope on the table before she occupied the chair across from Liz.

“I’m cursed with your lot.”

Liz rolled her eyes but said nothing out loud, merely waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“I have a proposition for you but first you should know moving forward that I’m not him. You so much as think of going back on our deal I will kill you and deal with the consequences later. Am I clear?”

Liz considered her carefully. The last time she had seen her, the other woman had been more than happy to be rid of her. For her to be back dealing with Liz, it meant something grave had to have happened. To  _him._

“What happened to Red?” Liz asked, doing her best to keep her trepidation out of her voice. “His recovery’s going well, isn’t it?”

“He made a full recovery. That’s beside the point.”

“What’s the point then?”

“He wants to leave.”

“That’s his call,” Liz said dryly. She had no intention of taking anything else from him. Not again.

“If only it were that simple! But as it turns out you’re an even bigger pain when you’re not around. He’s sunk into something that for the lack of a better word I’d call a depression. You’ve rejuvenated him once. I want you to do it again. Not for free, of course. We all know better by now than to expect anything else from you. Doctor Fulton’s testimony against you has unfortunately been lost and the good doctor is about to suffer an unfortunate accident. She will be either killed during an escape attempt or will commit suicide out of shame. As a result the federal prosecutor will drop all charges against you. 

B y the end of the week  you’ll even be able to pick up your daughter from Social Services. If you’re no longer on trial for a serious crime, I don’t see why custody should  continue to  be an issue. In addition to that, you also regain your old job, should you want to return to it, given your disinclination to deal with violent criminals. I’m curious, what did you think the FBI was all about when you joined the Academy? Rainbows and puppies? Anyhow, you will  also receive an additional three million a year for the next fifteen ones.”

“All for the low, low price of…?”

“Spending time with him and allowing him unrestricted access to your daughter.”

“And you think that just like that he’ll bounce back?” Liz asked incredulously.

“He stopped being suicidal and taking opium when he discovered your alleged death was just a trip to Cuba so there’s precedent.”

“You can’t just pay people to be in a relationship with someone.”

Wilkes gave her an ugly grin. “It worked for your husband, didn’t it?”

It was the second blow to the solar plexus in under a minute for Liz. “ Then you have your answer as to why I won’t do this to Red.” 

“Don’t make me laugh,” she said airily. “You’re loyal to nothing and nobody but your momentary interests. When you were interested in rolling in the hay with the pretty boytoy who sold you to the highest bidder, you forsook all your friends, everyone who’s ever trusted you, _him_ too. You couldn’t care less what it did to them, how they felt standing over your grave. And later you didn’t care that it compromised them and their integrity as long as it served your petty vengeance scheme. So you see you _are_ for sale. Now it’s only a matter of establishing the price.”

With her hands and legs bound, all Liz had left to use was her mouth. Use it, she did and spat in the other woman in the face. There was no reaction to it. The Admiral merely extracted a white, monogrammed handkerchief from one pocket. It gleamed as if it were made of silk. Then she wiped herself before inquiring. “Feeling better?”

“Not even close.”

Wilkes smirked. “ Oh, lighten up. You wouldn’t have to sleep with him. He’s well aware you find him  repellent and too much of a gentleman to  even bring it up. You could continue  gallivanting with any youngster to attract your fancy.”

Since when did Red think she found him  repellent?  The notion was painful but it was something to be settled between her and Red, nobody else. But she couldn’t do that from prison, especially not when, despite her best hopes and wishes, Red had failed to turn up to visit her. “I don’t want your money,” Liz  said testily. 

It turned out to be the spectacularly wrong thing to say. Wilkes’ expression darkened and her eyes became hostile. “ I’ve already told you  I’m not him! I’m not the poor saps of your Post Office colleagues,  either . This isn’t going to work with me. You can’t look like little, lost Bambi and I’ll melt. I’m here to recuperate the most valuable operative in the history of intelligence and I don’t care what I have to do to you to accomplish it. Furthermore, I’ll enjoy tearing into you, because I assure you the last thing I want to do is sit here and negotiate with the spawn of two traitors.”

“You still need me to agree,” Liz pointed out unhelpfully.

Again it was the wrong thing to say. Blue eyes became frosty autumn skies. Liz frowned, sorely regretting letting all the years she had put in training as a profile go to waste by neglecting the position she had once aspired to in order to chase after Tom and a wholly unrealistic dream of a family she had never had. Once she had been able to take pride in her accomplishments and a family would have completed the pictures perfectly. It had beenTom with his sulking and manipulations that had made her believe she had to choose between the two. How she wished she was as adept as profiling as she had been back when she still had pride and dreams other than pleasing Tom so he wouldn’t leave, lie or betray her again! A bit of profiling would have gone a long way now. But all she got off Wilkes was a sharp edge of danger. It wasn’t a skillful, intellectual deduction but the response of a primary instinct. She was in the presence of an alpha female and she would do well to be afraid. But the old Liz, the one who had not feared the Concierge of Crime when she had met him, came back knocking and she glared at the woman before in defiance. In truth she had never feared Red before Tom’s conditioning had ingrained within her the idea that there was something fundamentally wrong with her. So desperate she had been for it not to be true that she had chosen to blame it on Red. That was part of the reason she had been eager for him to be her father, because then she could truly fault him for everything, including the poison of self-deprecation Tom had slowly and drop by drop poured into her.

“Alright,” Wilkes interrupted in the middle of their staring match. “Let’s simplify the matter then, shall we? If we can’t strike a deal, you’re of no use to me and I’ll have to find another solution for my problem. That leaves you as a needless burden I’ll happily dispose of. So what do you want your autopsy report to say? Shot while trying to escape or suicide? I’m thinking hanging for the latter. You have a choice. You or Sharon Fulton. Because either way I’m burying a woman today.”

“Not just today, I’m sure,” Liz muttered wryly.

Wilkes laughed. Chillingly there was actual merriment in the sound. “No and not just one. Make no mistake, Keen, I’m not the Devil, I’m the one that gives the Devil nightmare. Now kindly stop wasting my time and let me know whose autopsy report I have to manufacture.”

Apparently something of the old profiler still resided within Liz, because there was no doubt in her mind that Admiral Wilkes meant every word. Liz didn’t want to die any more than she wanted to go to prison and loose custody of her daughter. She wanted to live, go free and see Agnes and Red. She had so many things to tell them both, chief among them being _sorry_. The fact that someone as ruthless and as dead set against her as Wilkes would forever hold this deal over her head was a small price to pay for that. She met the other woman’s eyes evenly.

“Deal,” she said coolly. “But I still don’t want any money.”

It was Wilkes’ time to roll her eyes. “Are you hard of hearing? Didn’t I just tell you this isn’t a negotiation. You don’t get to cherry pick. You can have the hangman’s noose or the money, freedom and your daughter, God help her.”

Liz understood what the old, utterly dangerous wolf wanted: the advantage of her taking the money. If Liz had merely accepted her freedom and to have her child returned, it would have been blackmail. That made her a victim. However, the money meant Wilkes was actually paying her to spend time with Red. If Liz stepped outside the line, Wilkes could use the knowledge to reign her in or denigrate her in Red’s eyes. Not that she needed much help in that department. Nobody was more adept as single-highhandedly detonating her relationship with Red than Liz herself.

“Alright,” Liz said reluctantly, not that she had any intention of spending the money.

Something flashed in Wilkes’ eyes, something that Liz didn’t like the sight of. With a sinking feel she realized there was something Wilkes was not telling her and that something was bad. Really bad.

* * *

Admiral Wilkes marched out of the federal prison building and stepped into her black sedan, her Navy assigned driver holding the door open for her. Once she was seated, she turned to the man who had been waiting for her return. A short staring duel ensued.

“Did he agree?” Dembe finally asked.

She scoffed. “What else could she have done? A martyr, she’s not.”

He looked at her uncertainly, clearly troubled by the dishonest nature of the whole situation. “Have you told her?”

“No, but you’re welcome to if you want.”

Dembe made a face.

“Just as I thought.”

* * *

_Six Months Ago_

Red felt as though his heart had been filled to the point of bursting. He doubted he would ever managed to make sense of it all. He could hardly understand what had bloomed in him when the woman he had adored in silence for so long and had always considered off limits had pressed her soft, flagrant mouth to his. He did realize, though, that Elizabeth had done as means of punishment. For him. For her as well. Red wondered which one she loathed more. Either way, the self disgust in her eyes was all too evident and distressingly familiar. Some of the old devotion battered at his soul. The pedestal he had once put her on might be long broken but he still loved her. He couldn’t help it any more than he could help breathing, although doubt now tinged it. How much of it was actually guilt? How much of it was a hopeless attempt to recreate what he had once had with Josephine? How much was it desperation and need to be seen and acknowledged as something other than a monster? He set aside the dubiety and reached for her.

“Elizabeth,” he said softly at first then added louder. “Elizabeth… it’s alright.”

She wrenched herself away. After a brief moment of hesitation, he gave chase.

“What are you doing?” she threw over her shoulder.

“Evidently running after you,” he replied as they were making it into the next alley.

She pivoted towards him, a look of devastation on her face. “Stop,” she murmured, sounding defeated.

He hated it but still shook his head. “I can’t.”

“You can’t or you won’t?”

“Does it make a difference?” he asked because in truth he didn’t know the answer himself.

She looked positively grief-stricken at that. “I suppose not.” She moved her head from left to the right. “This… this is sick. I feel sick. What is wrong with me? It hasn’t been so long since I thought you were my father.”

“Did you, Elizabeth? Did you really believe I was your father?” he repeated one of his previous question.

“I had to.”

“But why?”

She shook her head, seeming even more at a loss. His heart went out to him some more. He sighed heavily.

“You’re not sick, Elizabeth.”

“Then you are,” she rasped stabbing a finger at him. “You didn’t kiss me back… but you didn’t push me away, either.”

“I didn’t kiss you back because I didn’t get the time and I didn’t push you away because I didn’t want to,” he explained. This was one truth he could give her.

“What are you saying?”

He laughed wryly. “I think you know, Elizabeth. You certainly are old enough to.”

She glared at him, possibly not appreciating what she had heard in his tone. “Is this one of your twisted, little games? Or do you mean to tell me your fixation on the daughter of the man you’re impersonating is… is actually sexual in nature. Even for you… this is… this is….” She looked about to throw up.

Red regarded her sadly. “Yes, I know,” he said dully. He had repeated to himself all the things she couldn’t voice now many, many times. She was right, of course. This was sick and unnatural. For all the reasons she was aware of and for some that she didn’t know of yet. “However, I wasn’t the one who kissed first,” he pointed out then frowned at himself. Where had that come from?

Liz grimaced unhappily. “You….” She held up a hand as if to ward him off. “You goaded me into it. You manipulated me like you’ve been doing since the day you walked into my life. With your riddles and secrets and darkness and half-truths. You pushed me into it…. And it makes me sick. The thought of you touching me makes my skin crawl.”

“If there’s a darkness in your life, it’s because you were born into it. Sam might have bought some time away but even then it was there with you. Sewn into your childhood toy of all things.”

“Funny that’s not how anyone else tells it,” she said acridly.

“Really? How does everyone else tell the tale of a Navy officer having a child out of wedlock with a Russian agent? Or do you need to sugarcoat it because it hits too close to home? After all, you did knowingly marry a spy and making FBI confidential files available to him, despite the fact that you knew he had murdered a Russian defector and put you and all your colleagues on a kill list?”

Elizabeth’s face went white as a sheet of paper and he did feel a momentary pang of regret for hurting her in that manner. But he was tired of playing to her absurd Tom sensibilities when she played to none of his. When her palm went up to hit him, he intercepted it and held her firmly but carefully by the wrist. Her second hand moved upwards too and he grasped it as well. Their eyes met and locked. Her lips parted, her breathing loud and raspy, her eyes darkening in terrible anger. She was shockingly beautiful like this.

“Don’t you dare mention Tom’s name! I don’t want it sullied by your lips.”

“That’s not his name,” he said calmly.

“Neither is Raymond Reddington yours.”

“And you’re not Elizabeth Keen, Masha!”

She jerked against his hold on her but he held her fast. “You really shouldn’t be talking about treason when you’ve been a wanted traitor for decades.”

“No, your father was the traitor!”

She made to knee him in the groin but he spun her around and pressed her bodily against a nearby wall, still careful not to put his entire weight on her. She turned her head towards him, breathing even harder. He was close, his chin almost touching her shoulder and his nose level to her cheek. She smelled like fury, clean sweat and aloe.

“Then who are you?” she all but shouted.

He didn’t answer. They were glaring at each other, the rasp of their breath thunderously loud in his ears.

“Tell me,” she began this time softer. “Something… anything.”

She could really be this desperate for some measure of truth or it could be a ploy. In any case, he couldn’t imagine her caring enough to want to know something about him for personal reasons. He released her and stepped back. She whirled on him but her expression was now clouded, confusion filling her eyes. This time when she ran away, he did not follow.


	15. Ruin. Part Two

And I won't listen to your shame  
You ran away, you're all the same  
Angels lie to keep control  
Ooh, my love was punished long ago  
If you still care don't ever let me know.  
(Corey Taylor, _Snuff_ – acoustic cover)

  


_Now_

The little girl let go of the social worker’s hand the instant she saw Liz and ran straight into her mother’s arms. Liz crouched down and squeezed her child’s small body to her chest, peppering the top of her head with kisses.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered fervently. “My little girl! What have I done? I’ve abandoned you. I’m sorry… forgive me, Agnes, please.”

“Don’t cry, Mommy,” the girl said patting at her mother’s tear-streaked cheeks.

Liz hadn’t even realized she was crying. She clung tighter to her daughter, hoping that if there was a speck of goodness in her and Tom’s genes, Agnes had inherited it.

* * *

Dembe drove Agnes and Liz to the house the latter remembered as belonging to the man’s daughter and granddaughter. On the way he had been his usual stoic and taciturn self so Liz hadn’t suspected a thing. At the house, however, Dembe’s daughter—one of those days Liz really should have an effort and recall her name—cast her an icy gaze, put an arm around her own child, shielding her, and yanked her away when Agnes would have reached for her. Whatever Dembe or maybe even Red himself had told her about Liz, it definitely wasn’t good. Liz tried to meet Dembe’s eye but he was stubbornly looking away. She decided to postpone that conversation for later and followed Dembe to Red.

The room was bathed in the dusty golden glow of sunset. Dembe quietly shut the door after Liz and Agnes. Liz knew that Red was in the room and not just from the scent of sandalwood and smoke tinged musk. The gilded hair on the thick arm resting on the side of the armchair that had been turned to face the window, was all too familiar. She drew a breath, uncertain as to the name she should use with him now. He saved her from the decision by standing up and turning. Liz’s breath caught in her throat. He hadn’t looked like that since her return from her brief stint playing dead in Cuba. He had lost weight, a lot of it, too much considering how little time has passed. The white shirt he was wearing with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows hung loosely on him. And he was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, deep, dark shadows underscoring them. The anguished look on his face was also familiar. She had caused it too often not to remember it. He was sporting an uncharacteristic five o’clock shadow, a few silver hairs marking it towards his ears. She worried Admiral Wilkes had lied and he was still sick.

“Papi,” Agnes cried out and twisted herself away from Liz’s hand in order to run to Red who cast Liz a concerned, sheepish gaze, but still scooped the child in his arms, pressing his cheek to hers. Agnes held onto a side of his head, giggling, when he hugged her. “I missed you, papi.”

Liz lost his attention as he focused entirely on Agnes. “I missed you, too, honey.” He rubbed his nose against the little girl’s tiny one. “So much.”

Something tore painfully at Liz’s heart. She leaned on the door behind her looking at the two of them enveloped of the warm light of twilight. They seemed so much like father and daughter and for one insane moment Liz desperately wished it were true. That Agnes was Red’s. That things were simple. That she hadn’t ruined everything.

* * *

_Six Months Ago_

A sharp pain pierced Red’s head from temple to temple. He winced, breathing hard through his nose as he sat himself behind the wheel of his black Mercedes. He waited a few moments until the interior of the car stopped rolling around him and his vision cleared. The pain remained, though. He pulled the silver medicine case from a breast pocket and stared at it. His lips still bore the imprint of his Elizabeth’s curt kiss like a permanent tattoo. The gesture had had nothing to do with love or even passion. It had been meant to cut and hurt. It had achieved its goal. His heart was burning and his head was swimming, his emotions in turmoil. In that moment he was unsure whether he still loved her. He opened the vial and swallowed two of the white pills inside dryly.

* * *

Liz’s hand trembled when she knocked on the door, her knuckles impacting the wood with such force it hurt. She hadn’t meant to bang on the door with such force. She had not even realized she was doing it until the ache traveled up her arm. She didn’t know what the imposter’s game was, showing up for her like that but if it had been to confuse and taunt her, he had succeeded. Her lips still bore the imprint of his like a permanent tattoo. She still failed to comprehend what had possessed to do such a thing. It had to be him with his lies, head games and manipulations. And he had had achieved his goal. Her heart was burning and her head was swimming, her emotions in turmoil. In that moment she was unsure whether she still hated him.

Tom’s mother opened the door dressed in an elegant, flowing kimono style robe. Scottie was still tying the sash to the elaborate, pale blue silk garment, when she showed up on the doorstep. Her dark hair spread past her shoulders in uncharacteristically tangled tresses. Her pale lipstick was a little smudged. Her smile to Liz was a bit uncertain.

“Elizabeth, this is a surprise,” Scottie Hargrave said. “I thought we had agreed….”

Liz cast a quick, nervous glance around her. “I know… no contact until it’s safe but something’s happened… and I don’t know where else to go… who else can measure up with _him_.”

Scottie stepped aside. “Come in.”

The luxurious open floor Liz entered was brightly lit but oddly impersonal and cold, like a museum. It even had a white marble statue. Liz looked around her.

“Where’s Agnes?” she asked.

Scottie whirled towards her from a nearby tall-mounted, polished, black table. All traces of her lipstick were gone from her mouth. “Somewhere safe with a person I trust… a person Tom trusted too.”

Liz nodded without a word.

“Do you want to go there now?” Scottie added.

“No,” Liz replied firmly. “I don’t wanna run the risk of leading anyone to her right now.”

“And by anyone you mean Reddington,” Scottie completed airily. “Come, sit down, tell me what it is he’s done to you now.” She indicated a couch where Liz took a seat. She felt numb as if she was having an out-of-body experience. “Would you like something to drink?”

Liz shook her head no. Scottie came to sit next to her quietly and took her hand, squeezing it between long, cool, dry fingers. She smelled sweetly of vanilla and almonds and male musk. Liz gaze up at her, doubtful all of the sudden.

“Does this have anything to do with my son’s death? With why he died?”

A spasm shuddered through Liz and she felt the tell-tale prickle of tears. She nodded, her throat suddenly gone dry. Scottie removed a modest, white sea shells bracelet from her wrist. It stood in sharp contrast with what Liz knew of her high rise style. “He loved the water… your husband… when he was a child. We found this necklace in a trinket shop during a trip to Ocean City. It was the last thing he had from his family before he vanished. As though he never existed.” He pressed the necklace turned bracelet into Liz’s palm. “I would never see him again. Never hug him. Never know the man he’s become. You and your daughter are all I have left of him. So if Reddington’s done anything to you, if he’s hurt you… please tell me. Tell me what I can do because I will give everything down to my last breath to protect you.”

Liz looked at the fragile sea shells in her hand then back up at the Scottie, her eyes filling with tears. “He’s not my father,” she murmured brokenly. “He’s not even Raymond Reddington. Whoever he is, though, took Tom away from us. To protect his secret. The lies, the manipulations… I can’t take it anymore. I just want to make him pay. I want to destroy him!”

Scottie reached over and drew Liz into her slender arms. Liz’s face ended up in the fine silky of her robe. As she was sniffling, Liz realized there was a note of alcohol in Scottie’s scent she hadn’t detected before. Scottie stroked Liz’s hair for a while before letting go. “Elizabeth, listen to me. I own a private military intelligence firm. As of right now it’s at your disposal with all that entails.” She grasped Liz’s wet cheeks in her hands. “I promise you,” she said, tears shining in her eyes too. “Together we will make him pay. We’ll avenge my son’s death.”

* * *

Scottie calmly poured a good measure of Magnum Grey Goose vodka in two crystal tumblers and added ice. Then she trailed up the stairs to her bedroom. The light was on inside. There was a man in her bed, his chest bare. She sat next to his feet and handed him of the glasses pausing to take a sip from her own afterwards.

“You’re an artist, Scottie,” he complimented her with a grin. “It’s beautiful to watch you work.”

Frowning slightly, she lifted her bare feet to the Egyptian cotton sheet covering the bed then extended them towards the pillows. A large hand came to rest on her knee. She ran a finger over the edge of her glass. “It helped that I meant some of the things I said to my daughter-in-law.”

He knocked back some more of his drink. “What helps even more is the astounding piece of intelligence we’ve just been made privy to. The Concierge of Crime, the wrench in our business for so long, is not former Navy officer, Raymond Reddington, who sold out his country for a penny more and a lot of power.”

Scottie peered at him over the gleaming edge of her crystal tumbler. “Whoever this man, he’s resourceful.”

“I have to say! He’s held the Alliance hostage for decades with the Fulcrum while pretending to be someone else with none the wiser. He built an empire out of a false identity and used it to go to war… and win. If he wasn’t such a pain in the back, I could almost admire him.”

“You do admire him,” she fired back. “My point, however, is that no matter how good and cunning this man is, he couldn’t have done all this alone. Maybe later but not in the beginning. Somebody helped him set it up. Somebody who made Mrs. Reddington and her child… a daughter, I believe… disappear into Witness Protection. Somebody who smoothed the edges and had the means and ability to orchestrate a cover-up.”

“Do you think someone else is out there? Someone or something we don’t know about?”

Scottie took another sip of her vodka, rolling it on her tongue for a few moments. “Or maybe it’s somebody we know.”

* * *

Lying on the couch in his Bethesda apartment, his cat sleeping in his lap, a pillow supporting his weary, aching head, Red listened patiently to the man on the other end of the telephone conversation he was currently having. “Thank you, Raleigh,” he said after a while. “I’m much obliged.” He flipped his burner shut after several more pleasantries had been exchanged.

“Problem?” Dembe asked upon entering with a tray with two identical white porcelain cups on it.

Red inhaled the lime infused aroma of the tea his brother had prepared with relish. “Susan Hargrave has just contracted Raleigh for a special order. She wants an alibi for the duration of this year’s UN General Assembly.”

“It’s a good thing I happen to know her motive then,” said a familiar, sharply clear voice from behind Dembe.

Red winced, woefully regretting telling her about this place.

“Dembe, would you be so kind as to make another cup of tea?”

His brother nodded and left with only a pointed glance at the intruder, one that she ignored, standing in the middle of his living room, dressed all in black like a cat burglar, her long, flaxen hair tied in a ponytail. She was regarding Red wryly but there was a triumphant gleam in her eyes that he did not like at all. He gently moved his cat to a couch cushion, scratching her behind the ears when she gave a pitiful mewl of protest at that. He sat up, gearing for a confrontation. The air between them was already crackling with electricity.

“Hello, Emma,” he said, all frosty politeness. “It’s been a while.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Yours,” he retorted.

She pulled out her phone and turned the screen so he could see it. A few photographs of Elizabeth on Susan Hargrave’s doorstep flashed in quick succession.

“It doesn’t prove anything,” he observed. “Elizabeth left her daughter with Scottie. It’s normal that she should visit her.”

“It’s going to be a tight competition for the title of mother of the year between those two. One misplaced her son during a drunken spat with her husband. I always thought they couldn’t agree on who had more extramarital affairs. The other one left her daughter with the one woman who tried to kill them both at her own wedding. But here’s the real kicker: the child’s not there with Scottie.”

Red’s blood ran cold. “Where’s she?”

“Considering the people involved, anywhere really. You picked an awfully wrong moment to swear off abducting children.”

His phone pinged cutting off the sharp reply that sat just on the tip of his tongue. He had a message from Jennifer.

_My sister knows. She had me move and said she’d go to a friend for help._

“Who’s that?” Emma asked conversationally, having occupied a seat on a nearby chair.

“Jennifer Reddington.”

She chuckled. “Ladies and gentlemen, he’s back.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Before you decided to play the phantom of the opera to Masha Rostova’s Christina, you had women eating out of the palm of your hand and you loved it. Don’t tell me you don’t miss it! You’ve always been riddled with your fair share of issues but then let’s face it: everyone in our business is a little off. But you still enjoyed it, you used to laugh, have fun. Aren’t you tired of all this doom and gloom?”

He stalked to where she was sitting, all purpose and determination. “Dembe,” he called out. “You can forget the tea.”

A few seconds later, he heard the front door close after his brother. His right hand darted out and he buried his fingers in the thick mane of her hair dragging her to her feet. Her eyes clouded instantly and color raised to her cheeks.

“Was Scottie alone?” he asked in his best commanding tone.

“Oh please! Her bed’s never cold.” His firm grasp on her hair did nothing to temper her sarcasm.

He released her. Doing this with Emma was like dancing with knives and never without consequences but it was safe, unlike it would have been with someone like Madeline Pratt. Her smile was inviting when she shed her black leather jacket. He craved the oblivion and with the situation so volatile, he couldn’t afford to take opium.

Emma raised an eyebrow. “Unless you want to pay the other Reddington girl a visit.”

“She’s innocent… in so many ways still,” he defended quietly.

“Nobody’s innocent. You should know that better than anyone.”

He winced.

“Did Willy send you?”

“No, it would’ve been redundant. As your handler, it’s my job to see to your stability. You’ve been undercover for far too long. It’s easy to get lost inside the mask.”

He looked away. “Maybe there’s nothing beyond the mask anymore. The man I once was is long gone. All that’s left is Raymond Reddington.”

She grasped his chin and turned his face towards her again. “Raymond Reddington is dead but you’re alive. After all you’ve been through, you must realize it’s because you want to be.”

He smiled wryly and reached to undo her ponytail arranging her golden locks around her head and on her shoulders. “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” she added.

She tilted her head for a kiss but he avoided it, digging instead a thumb into the pulse point at her neck.

“Bedroom,” he ordered.

* * *

Scottie poured herself the last of the vodka bottle before retrieving her phone from a pocket of her robe. She dialed and waited.

“All quiet?” she asked when she got a reply.

“Yes,” Solomon responded. “Your granddaughter is sleeping… well, like a baby.”

“I want you to take extra care so that nobody gets close to her.”

“Oh really?” he bit back sardonically. “Is that why you had me reduced to literal baby-sitting? Because I used to think it was my vast experience in the area.”

“Spare me, Matias, I also provided you with an actual baby-sitter and seize-able incentive.”

He laughed, the sound positively acid. “It’s nowhere near the incentive the only Hargrave heir is providing you. So if it’s not too much to ask, I’d like some time to myself to spend it with adults who don’t read Doctor Seuss. Or I might just go off kilter and make a call to your husband. Inform him of the precious burden you’ve had spirited away. After all, the children are our future.”

 


	16. The Man Who Would Be King

Not ready to let go  
'Cause then I'll never know  
What I could be missing  
I'm missing way too much  
So when do I give up what I was wishing for?  
(Jason Walker,  _Down_ )

 

_Six Months Ago_

Liz opened the door to her darkened apartment and nearly jumped out of her skin when she saw Red on her couch waiting for her.

“Why do I bother locking the door?”

His lips stretched in a thin smile. “Locks mean nothing to a skilled pick-pocketer as you should well know,” he pointed out unhelpfully. He wasn’t in a suit but in an all-black assemble of jeans, t-shirt and a jacket that on him was casual. His attire wasn’t so unusual after the year before but still seeing him out of a suit and fedora made her instantly suspicious. Not that there was something about him that didn’t. “I once knew a fellow in Andorra. A most curious tiny nation in France. Did you know they have cows on their flags? Two of them actually.”

Liz locked her door and leaned against it with a sigh. “I’m tired and I’m in no mood. Get to the point.”

He stood and stalked to her, his strides wide and purposeful. Liz glared at him, refusing to be intimidated. He only stopped when he was just a breath away from her. “Trust is a weakness. This is something I’ve been practicing and teaching ever since I embarked on this life and yet... I trusted you.” He caught a wayward lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger and then tucked behind her left ear.

Liz’s heart was loud in her eyes as their gazes locked into steady battle.

“In order to trust you, I renounced my instincts,” he drawled on. “My own good judgment and the warnings of others. I always knew, on some level, that you would betray me but... when you finally did, I still failed to see it coming. I held your cold, inert hand in mine and just believed it all. Even now I still want to believe. I don’t want to abide by own rules. By my own devotion to loyalty.”

Liz realized he knew she had been to Scottie Hargrave. “Are you having me followed, Red? Again?!” Calling him Reddington felt wrong now but the nickname was more neutral. Perhaps he had acquired him on his own after taking on the persona of Raymond Reddington. Perhaps it had not belonged to her father.

He chuckled lightly. “I am not.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You never believe me.”

“You talk of loyalty but what do you know about it? When have you ever been loyal to anyone?”

His features twisted into something unpleasant. “I will not be your punching bag anymore, Elizabeth. You don’t get to take a more or less metaphorical swing at me every time you’re disgruntled, angry or self-loathing. I understand now why you wished for me to be your father. You had finally realized your dream of being able to blame me for absolutely everything, including the darkness residing within yourself. If you broke your vow as an FBI agent, if you went on a revenge quest you would not have abided a few years ago, if you abandoned your daughter, it was because of me, of the evil you inherited from me. It could never be your fault. I was your ideal moral alibi.”

The reference to Agnes sparked something within Liz. Earlier she had left Scottie’s house with a heavy heart and the distinct feeling that something was amiss. “You’re the last man on earth who should be talking about family abandonment. You deserted yours on Christmas Eve. So excuse me if I don’t take parenting lessons from you.”

An ugly grin flourished on his lips. “I didn’t abandon my family. That was your father. I’m not Raymond Reddington, remember?”

“And you don’t have a family?”

“I used to. I once told you about them but you either thought I lied or didn’t pay attention. I told you I used to be much like everyone else. I had a family, a lovely house in the suburbs, friends, playdates to arrange. We barbecued in the backyard almost on every weekend when the weather was warm and sunny.”

“Where are they?” she asked suspiciously.

His expression darkened and he drew back. “I told you that as well.”

Liz frowned. “You said you lost all that…. How?”

“I also told you I know what is like to lose yourself in the darkness. By the time I came back, there was only one tiny spark of light left in the obscurity.” He looked at her pointedly, his gaze so intense it was hard to bear. “I reached for it after a while… perhaps too long of a while… and it burnt me. Twice over.”

Liz blinked. Something was struggling within the depths of her memory as it fought its way to the surface.

_Fire… smoke… dolls melted by the flames… a hand of her shoulder… steady and guiding… a tall, dark silhouette profiled against the golden red of the crackling inferno._

_Come with me._

“Who are you?” she asked again grabbing onto the lapels of his jacket.

He grasped her upper arms, stilling her momentum. His eyes bore into hers but he wasn’t saying anything.

“You were there the night of the fire,” she said mechanically.

“You already know as much.”

“Did you kill my father?” she asked not letting go of him.

His mouth fell open, a crestfallen look filling his face. His hands dropped to his sides and he shifted his gaze to a remote point past her right shoulder. “I wish,” he began, his voice so low she strained to hear him and so gruff it sounded like the rasp of sand paper. “I wish I had. Or at least, I wish I could lie to you and say I did. But all I can do is what I’ve always done. Be your sin eater one more time. Accept the further blemish on my soul to keep yours clean or at least, as clean as it remains. I know you don’t want what you remembered when you shot Connolly to be true. So blame me, I will wear it. Take a swing, Elizabeth.”

She began to cry and released him as well then took a step back. She stared at him willing the anger to come and rescue her from the remembered weight of the gun in her hand and memory of fire and unspeakable acts. What she had done as an adult she could rationalize, no matter how much it ate at her, but to have committed something so atrocious as child, it had to mean she was truly depraved, it was in her blood, it what who she was. She carried it within herself the same way her DNA carried the warrior gene. She was the monster. She belonged in the dark and in the arms of the man who had hit her. And if the Concierge of Crime wasn’t her father, then it was all on her. She had nobody to blame for the wickedness within but herself. It was all her fault. It was all on her. She shook her head and wiped at the tears on her face with a hand, ignoring the handkerchief he was extending her.

“Leave… just go,” she said weakly.

He pulled his hand back, returning his handkerchief to his pocket. “Do you need it to be me? If you want to believe I pulled that trigger and killed your father, then by all means do it. Hate me for it, if you must.”

“Why? Why would you still want to be my sin eater after everything I’ve done? After all the times I’ve pushed you away? Threatened you? Lied to you? Why do you always come for me? Trade yourself for me? Go bankrupt for me? Save me? Do you know I never said one single sincere thank you or sorry to you?”

His face hardened and his eyes seemed haunted for a few moments. A muscle twitched nervously in his left cheek. It was never a good omen.

“You already have some experience with the pervasiveness of guilt, Elizabeth. This anger… this all-consuming rage of yours is merely unacknowledged guilt. You took a life and then another and another. Tom Connolly, those you’ve killed to avenge Tom. The rabbit hole is never-ending once you take so much as a single step inside. They stay with you, don’t they? The dead. The blood on your hands stains the soul and pieces of it begin to fade away. I know because I’ve felt it too. I started to feel it in relation to you…. It can push you to do terrible things. But over the years my own guilt has morphed into something else. A desire to atone, to pay. I know there’s no forgiveness for what I’ve done. In my heart I’ve always been aware that no penance could cleanse the charred remnants of what was once a human heart. I’ve done things, Elizabeth, that even you, for all you have dabbled into darkness, can hardly picture. But I thought that maybe that way I could earn myself a small measure a peace. That maybe just maybe I could go home. The farmer who’s taken to pillaging and burning can never plow the land again but perhaps there is a small hut by the edge of the forest from where he can see his old village that would never welcome him back. It was there that he had hoped to live off the rest of his days in quiet solitude. If he’s very fortunate, one or two of the selected few would come to visit him from time to time.”

“So that’s it?” she uttered, pulling at the unexpected knot of disappointment in her chest. “That’s all? All these years you kept saving me because you feel guilty?”

“If it were only guilt, it would be easy.”

“Then what is it?” she yelled in exasperation. “Who am I to you? Why am I so important? Why do you never stop hounding me? Why all the secrets?”

He raised a hand to cup her left cheek but she shied away. He withdrew, his eyes becoming distant and sad.

“I so wished it to be true, Elizabeth…. I was desperate for it to be you but lately I’ve come to believe that maybe I am wrong.”

“Would you stop speaking in riddles for one second?”

“When you live the life I have for so long, you need to hope for something or else I would have gone insane a decade or so ago. I needed to be light at the end of the tunnel. A second chance. A way home. A guiding star. For a moment I believed you were the only one I had left. I told myself that was what I saw when I looked at you… my way home. Polaris, the North Star. But you lead me astray and my ship crashed on the rocks instead of reaching a safe haven. Most likely I am to blame much more than you. I put too much on you. I wanted you too much to be somebody else. Another truth is that there is somebody else. Perhaps someone died in the cold water at Cape May after all. The person I’ve mistaken you for… because since then every time I look at you, all I can see is an illusion. When I dream of going home, you’re not there.”

Liz propelled herself towards, rage turning her vision into a tunnel. “How dare you?”

He grasped by the wrists again, his fingers firm, his hold steady. “Do not fret, Elizabeth,” he said with infuriating calm. “You’ll finally get your heart’s desire. I will leave as soon as my goals for surrendering to the FBI are accomplished.”

She glared at him. “I knew it! You lied. Your surrender had nothing to do with me.”

“Of course it did,” he responded, still eerily calm. “If I had plans to surrender to the authorities, it didn’t have to be to the FBI. You know I hold the Bureau in no high regard. I chose the FBI specifically for you and it might have escaped your notice, but it did me no favors.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” she replied acidly.

He gave her a wry smile in response and released her then stepped away heading for the door. “Elizabeth, you may want to bear in mind that while I have my own agenda, so does Scottie does. And your daughter’s alone with her,” he warned right before he left.

She remained in the solitary quiet of her would-be family home. Breathing hard, she recognized the sentiment animating her. Shockingly enough it was grief.

# # #

_Now_

Dembe came to take Agnes to play with his granddaughter and brought the best mint tea Liz had ever tasted. It was sweetened with honey and the added flavor was wonderful. She told Dembe as much and he regarded her as if she had just finished growing a second heard. He cast a nervous glance in Red’s direction as he left. Red gave him a reassuring smile. Something was definitely off. She turned towards Red, as Dembe left, wanting to ask but afraid to at the same time.

Red beat her to it. “It was Agnes who started to call me _papi._ I merely never corrected her.”

Liz waved a hand dismissively. It wasn’t important. She tried to smile. “So… how are you?”

In an instant everything changed. He went even paler, which was a surprise, because Liz doubted that was possible. His cup came down to the table before him with so much force it shattered upon impact. Liz was startled.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said as he was rushed towards the door.

He faltered a little on the way. Liz was on her feet immediately, about to help him, but he ran out before she could reach him.

# # #

He stormed into Corinne Wilkes’ kitchen, his breathing loud and raspy in his own years. He really shouldn’t be making so much effort so much but at the moment but he didn’t care. He knew she was alone. Her husband had been going jogging at this hour of the morning for well over forty years.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” she commented sarcastically in lieu of greeting.

“How much?” he breathed.

“Apparently Katarina Rostova’s gift for honey traps isn’t genetic. Anyway, a woman who voluntarily stayed with a man who had married her for a job should be more adept at this.”

“How much?” he repeated.

“I have to ask. What did she do that gave her away?”

“She asked how I was,” he replied matter-of-factually.

Her eyes widened. “Six and a half years. You worked side by side, you saved her life about a million times, you took a bullet to rescue that child she keeps passing onto others, you got yourself tortured for her… twice that I know of, had her badge returned after she shot the Attorney General no less, and she never asked how you are? Not once? How did that not ring any alarm bells?”

“It’s ringing all the alarm bells now.”

“Better late than never, I suppose. To answer your question, her freedom, her badge, custody of her daughter who, like you, can do better, and three million a year for the next fifteen ones. Are you sure I can’t interest you in the girlfriend experience with a high class hooker? It’ll cost considerably less.”

He sat down at her kitchen table heavily. “Truth be told, I should have known when she came over with Agnes. Elizabeth would never let me spend time with her without a hefty price tag.”

She patted his right hand awkwardly. It wasn’t her style to offer consolation. “She’s not your daughter, Kenneth! But that doesn’t mean you can’t still have children with somebody else. That you can’t be happy with somebody else.” She withdrew her hand. “Her sister has proven surprisingly reasonable through all this.”

He lowered his gaze, the weight on his chest all but crushing the breath out of him. “This isn’t about Elizabeth.”

“There’s somebody else, isn’t it? Please tell this whole debacle isn’t a case of rebound gone horribly wrong.”

He looked away. “I’ll pay the three million every year. You don’t have to take it out of some black ops account. I know how much you hate that.”

“You’ll never not be old hence repellent in her eyes,” she pointed out. “For her you’ll never amount to anything other than a convenience or an easy target.”

He got up. “I know, Willy. It’s taken me a few years but I finally do.” He wavered on his feet, his vision blurring at the edges. A steely hand gripped his left arm steadying him.

 


	17. The Farmer

 

 

So sing while we’re falling apart  
I’ll take you dancing  
We’ve lived through the wreck of our hearts  
And now we’re just picking up the pieces,  
Learning how to see when  
Love is in the dark  
There’s a cold empty room  
There’s a window less view  
There’s a me without you  
But that’s not where I belong  
Through the waves of the deep  
And the storms of the sea  
I have you and you me  
We’re not too far gone   
(Sleeping Wolf, _The Wreck of Our Hearts_ )

  


_S_ _ix Months Ago_

 

_I didn’t abandon my family. That was your father…._

_I told you I used to be much like everyone else. I had a family…._

_I’m not Raymond Reddington._

_A farmer comes home one night…._

Liz bolted upwards in her bed of tangled sheets. Sleep was eluding her, anyway. Her feet landed on the carpet by her bed.

“He was talking about himself.” She ran a hand through her hair shocked that she had never seen it before. Once she had taken pride in her abilities as a profiler. Where were her once vaunted skills as well her pride in them? Apparently, she had chosen turning into the Stewmaker over honing her capacities like she had once dreamed.

She wrenched herself away from her comforter and padded bare feet to the kitchen. She found her way by memory alone without turning on the lights. Darkness wasn’t half bad once one got used to it, she had discovered. She had no idea why Faux Red had t go on and on about the light and finding one’s way towards it. It seemed to her that light was overrated. Too many things came crawling out of the woodwork in the light. The ghosts and the faces of all those she had killed. She would never give him the satisfaction of admitting to it but the dead did haunt her, just like he had predicted. It made sense that he would know when he had killed so many more than her. Let it him blunder about searching for light. She hoped he drowned in it. As for her, she reveled in darkness. She was safely obscured there from the accusing eyes of the dead.

She opened her desolately empty fridge and blocked the door that way with her knee as she rooted in a nearby drawer. She finally managed to come across a Pop-Tart, tore the wrapper and tossed in the microwave.

 _A farmer comes home one day to find that everything that gives meaning to his life is gone. Crops are burned, animals slaughtered, bodies and broken pieces of his life strewn about. Everything that he loved, taken from him. His children…._  
  


She popped the freshly microwaved Pop-Tart in her mouth, bit on it then chewed her bite absently. So he had children. The imposter. At least, one. He and Raymond Reddington seemed close in age. Statistically, it wasn’t unlikely for man in his late twenties and early thirties to be married with at least one child in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“I’ve been profiling the wrong man,” she informed her empty, dark kitchen once she had finished her Pop-Tart. She hadn’t even noticed the flavor.

She switched on the coffee maker and shimmied to the table, listening to it brew in the quiet of the night. It was no surprise she had profiled Raymond Reddington. When he had drawn the profile she had foolishly shared with him as they were chasing the Freelancer, she had had only Raymond Reddington’s files and Ressler’s case reports. And Ressler was thinking along with everyone else that he was hunting down Raymond Reddington. But everything she had learned about the imposter over the years bellied her initial profile of him. He may be rootless but he claimed to yearn to go home. Though they made him vulnerable, he did have tight bonds. To her, to Dembe, even to poor Kate.

She slammed her palm down on the table angrily. She should have realized sooner that something was amiss. Everything in his official records was contradicted by him as a person. And then there were the many other details that didn’t match like the lack of a medical record on file for Raymond Reddington, the fact that in all the years chasing him FBI had gotten one photo and even that one wasn’t usable. That he had once let it slip that he had had plastic surgery. It was all coming together now and it stung. It had been there right in front of her eyes the whole time. And she had failed to see it. Just like with Tom. Her heart clenched painfully and she was so overcome with rage in that instant that she could barely see.

 _One can only imagine the pit of despair, the hours of job-like lamentations, the burden of existence. He makes a promise to himself in those dark hours. A life's work erupts from his... knotted mind. Years go by. His suffering becomes... complicated. One day he stops. The farmer, who... is no longer a farmer... sees the wreckage he's left in his wake. It is now he who burns. It is he who slaughters. And he knows, in his heart... he must pay._  
  


Oh but she would make him pay. But first she would learn the one thing he still wasn’t telling her. His name.

* * *

_Now_

“Teach me… teach me, papi,” Agnes cried excitedly pounding the piano’s keyboard with her tiny fingers.

“If that’s alright with your mother,” he said with uncharacteristic hesitancy peering at Liz over the tall, chestnut-colored wood of the musical instrument.

Liz shrugged one shoulder. “Why wouldn’t it be alright with me?” she asked, rotating her gaze to find a place to put the plate of food she had asked Dembe for and which she had then carried into Isabella’s living room where Red was playing with Agnes. “Come and eat first, though.”

She shot Red an imploring look but he wasn’t meeting her eyes. He was still pale, drawn and strangely subdued. Perhaps his actual personality was less jovial but she still missed his larger than life persona. She smiled at him and Agnes when she set the plate on the coffee table. He grabbed one of the cucumber sandwiches Dembe had prepared and served Agnes.

“There’s plenty for everyone,” Liz said encouragingly while snatching one herself as if to prove it.

“I’m not hungry,” Red replied sullenly.

Liz nearly choked on her bite. Either the end of the world had just become imminent or something was rotten in the state of Red. Was he depressed? Was that why he had poisoned himself? That wasn’t like him. Red fought tooth and nail for life and always found reasons to go on in the most unlikely of places. But even the most resilient of men could reach his limit. She had taken his endurance for granted for too long. No more, though.

“I’ll go get us some juice,” she said and dashed into the kitchen.

“I think he’s depressed,” she mouthed to Dembe.

Dembe’s eyes widened but other than that his expression gave away nothing.

“He’s not on anything,” he said quietly after a pause that got so long it nearly became unbearable for Liz.

She frowned. “What is he supposed to be on?”

“He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t smoke. He drinks very little. But he’s not taking opium… not yet.”

And the punches kept coming. “He’s using drugs?” she said a bit too loud.

Dembe glared at her.

A few short seconds later Red came into the kitchen. He might be acting oddly but his instincts were as sharp as ever.

“Come on, Elizabeth, let’s take Agnes for another stroll in the garden. What you said that I didn’t hear most assuredly made Dembe want to search my room again.”

Dembe glared at Liz again.

“You overdosed,” he told Red.

“I almost drowned,” Red retorted as he was turning to leave. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Dembe… why did he poison himself?” Liz asked once the two of them were alone again. “You know, don’t you?”

“Elizabeth, when I told you that he had killed Kate… or at least so I thought at the time, it was because I had hoped you would reach him when I could not. That you would help him see the light again not use the knowledge I had trusted you with to torment him.”

Liz lowered her gaze, her cheeks burning with shame. “People who live in the dark themselves can’t help anyone reach for the light.” She gingerly raised her eyes to his. “I’m sorry, Dembe…. I know it’s too late for… anything… and everything. I know it’ll change nothing at this point. I know I’m way past forgiveness. But I _am_ sorry!”

He nodded gravely. “You’re right, Elizabeth. It’s far too late.”

“Elizabeth, are you coming?” resounded Red’s voice from the living room.

“Yeah.”

When she arrived outside, Red was whirling Agnes in the air. Sunlight streamed down on them enveloping them making them seem inaccessible and intangible to her. Tears were quick to fill her eyes. She pressed a hand to her mouth as she tried to stave them.

* * *

His hand went instinctively to his back where it only encountered the fleece of his hoodie instead of his holstered gun. His free arm shot up the wall and he turned the lights on. Elizabeth was standing by his window, her head bowed, some of her long, brown hair falling in her face.

“I made a deal with Admiral Wilkes. My freedom, Agnes’ custody, my badge and three million a year. In exchange I’m supposed to let Agnes spend time with you.”

He closed the door with a heavy heart. “I know. I suspect it was Dembe’s idea. He’s at his wits’ end and for that I am sorry. I told Willy I would pay you the three million a year. She detests squandering black ops funds. Am I to understand you wish to renege on your agreement with her? Are you here to ask me to mitigate her response?”

Elizabeth raised red, swollen eyes to his. She looked like she had been crying. A lot. She shook her head, her teeth digging into a whitened lower lip.

“Then what can I do for you, Elizabeth?”

She closed the small distance between them and dropped to her knees. The impact was loud and it had to have hurt. She tried to grab at his legs but he darted out of her reach, not bearing the mere idea of her touch.

“Forgive me… please. I know I have no right to ask. Even Dembe who’s usually so understanding made that clear. I already knew, though. Please…. Tell what you want me to do. I’ll take any punishment. I’ll do anything. Hurt me… Do whatever you want…. Just… forgive me, please. I thought I could but I can’t take you shutting me out. I can’t take it, knowing you won’t forgive me. I’m sorry! So sorry. It’s meaningless, I’m well aware. That’s why I came to tell you… I’m ready. I know I have to pay and I will.”

It was awful. She was pallid, her cheeks streaked with tears, her hair a tangled mess, as she was sniffling and groveling. He felt disgust and astonishment in equal measures. Disgust at himself for having put her on a pedestal. Astonishment that she could apologize to him with anything resembling sincerity.

“What I want has never been a factor you were prepared to consider. What’s changed?”

Her gaze clouded. She was going to lie, he realized. She couldn’t manage an honest apology to him, after all. He waved her off. He was tired, mournful and his head was splitting. He wasn’t in the mood for any more of her lies.

“What you destroyed, Elizabeth, can’t be glued back together. It’s only a matter of picking up the pieces now.”

“How do we do that?” she asked still on her knees.

“I saw the pleading looks you cast me when you think I can’t see you. Don’t think that I didn’t. What I loathe the most and the fault here is mine not yours is that even now, after everything, there is a part of me that wishes to comfort you. To offer you reassurances. To tell you that you’re forgiven. But you are most decisively not! The rest of me… wants to put his hands around your neck and squeeze till the sound of bones cracking can be heard. You’re familiar with the feeling, I’m sure.”

She winced, apparently catching his not-so-subtle reference to her discovering Tom’s treason, but he no longer cared to spare her feeling on that front.

“But I could never leave Agnes motherless, too,” he continued.

“So what do you want to do now?”

He circled around her and went towards the window to gaze at the moonlit garden outside. The tormented knot of feelings her outbursts had provoked had exhausted him. His head-ached was worse too. “I want to sleep… I want to sleep and never wake up.”

“No,” she said behind him, her voice soft but her tone firm. “You don’t give up.”

“Maybe that’s just Raymond Reddington,” he responded dully.

“No,” she repeated with even more determination in her tone. “It’s you. It’s always been you.”

He turned to find her still kneeling and staring at him with wide, wet eyes that were burning like incandescent coals. “Do not go gently into that good night,” he quoted wryly and without meaning it, his words sounding hollow to his own ears. “Rage, rage against the dying of the night…. Who do you see, Elizabeth, looking back at you now?”

“If I tell you and don’t lie, there will be no pieces left to pick.”

“Tell me anyway.”

She blinked at him and seemed to withdraw, her face fogging again. Then something shifted in her eyes.

“I see….” She licked at her lips, seeming unsure of her next words. “The man I love.”

He started to laugh. “Perhaps Dembe should have been searching _your_ room for drugs.”

 


	18. In Plain Sight

_Six Months Ago_

The tension in the Post Office’s main hub was thick and palpable. Everybody was trying to hide what they hoped the others didn’t know. Dembe was keeping a suspicious eye on them all like he used to during the first year of Red’s collaboration with the FBI. Any and all trust built since then had evaporated into thin air. Aram, in particular, was so tense and wore such an obvious deer in the headlights look on his face that Liz wondered how they had ever thought they could keep this from Red, given the computer whiz’s terrible poker face. Liz also puzzled over the fact that she hadn’t told her co-workers what she had figured out about Red. She attempted to rationalize it by telling herself that so far all she had was a hunch. An ill-defined one at best gleaned off a fable Red had recounted while she had been drugged out of her mind.

She surveyed Red from where she was standing at Ressler’s side. Red was gesturing widely, his large hands moving freely around himself, genial and jesting as usual, detailing the latest case he had brought them with verve. He was superbly elegant in burgundy suit she had never seen before. The yellow lights of the Post Office glided off a similarly new paisley tie. He was the only one who was acting naturally. His perfectly tailored suit only highlighted his mastery of the situation. Liz had never understood better the strategic value of his three-piece suits. It didn’t matter if they matched Raymond Reddington’s personal style or that of the imposter. They were not just attire, they formed a battle armor. They communicated wealth, control, and most of all, power. Currently he was yielding that power against them and despite themselves, despite their determination, it was working. It worsened Aram’s stress, tore at Ressler’s control and made even Cooper seem a little uncertain. It was a subtle difference, one somebody less accustomed to Red’s devices might have missed, but it dealt a blow if only on morale. It contributed to Red’s perceived invulnerability.

Liz hated him for it. She had the unpleasant feeling they were all amateurs playing awkwardly at the deception game while he was the real deal. He had pretended to be another man for over three decades and built a criminal empire from that falsehood, making a name that didn’t even belong to him one that was striking fear in many hearts. Dangerous didn’t even begin to describe him. Liz gritted her teeth wishing there wasn’t a part of her that was wryly impressed by such a feat. As if he could be summoned by the power of her thinking of him, he turned his head and locked eyes with her. She had never been able to tell what color those mesmerizing orbs were. Right now they looked like a feline’s eyes: gleaming and predatory, intense and laser focused. And they had her in his sights. The air became hard to breathe all of the sudden. Liz glared back at him. Something sparked alive in his gaze and his lips twitched. He was trying hard to hide the fact that he was smiling at her, she realized.

 _Watch closely, Lizzy,_ his voice lured from memory.

She blinked it away. “Is that all?” she said out loud.

“A case of corruption and unlawful military contracting practices going all the way to the Capitol is not enough to get the FBI interested, Agent Keen? Either you’re hard to impress or you’re playing hard to get?”

He was definitely done playing her father.

“You have no idea,” she quipped.

He didn’t bother to hide a mischievous grin this time.

“In any eventuality, we’re bound to find out at the Hillwood Gala on Tuesday. Evan Cranston, our blacklister, will be in attendance. I managed to secure myself and Agent Keen an invitation,” he finished shifting his gaze to Cooper, defiance radiating off him, as if he was daring the Assistant Director to deny him. Cooper couldn’t. If only a fraction of what Red had told them was true, then national security was threatened. Cooper had to commit to action. This point went to Red. They were stranding playing by his tune. For now.

_At the outside they are opponents, each has something the other wants. They size one another up, assessing risk, setting boundaries, challenging each other to breach them._

“Who are we going to be?” Liz challenged.

Red’s lips quirked again. “Why don’t we leave that a surprise for now?” he replied, dropping his voice almost all the way to a whisper, making it seem like out of that entire room he was only talking to her.

_A sensuous battle, violence and sex, balanced on the blade of a knife. Nothing given when it’s not earned, nothing taken when it’s not given. This is the pure essence of negotiation. Not a poker game, but a Milonga. A tango. Seduction._

 

Oh but he wasn’t seducing her so easily! She narrowed her eyes. “You’re a wanted criminal. How are you going to show up at a major social event?”

 

He chuckled. “You overestimate the popularity of your little Most Wanted list. How many social butterflies do you imagine have ever even glanced it? In any case, in all the years I spent hiding, I’ve discovered that the trick to it is do it in plain sight. Something you, all more or less reputable FBI agents, are strikingly inept at.” He gestured with his left palm across his chest. “Aram, you’re excused. If you sat any straighter, you risk cracking your spine at some point and Samar would never forgive me for causing it. And Donald, could you look more like you have something up your sleeve?”

 

He grabbed his hat from the edge of a desk and carefully fitted it on his head. “I’ll pick you up Tuesday, Elizabeth. Make sure not to forget your clutch.”

 

Aram shot her a crestfallen look she chose to ignore, while she could feel Ressler fret at her side. Once Red was gone, Cooper got up and signaled the three of them to follow him to his office. Liz found herself wishing Samar was back already. At least, she managed to be more or less cool in Red’s presence when the occasion called for it.

 

* * *

 

Liz still didn’t know why she wasn’t telling her co-conspirators what she had realized about Red. She didn’t like it that one of her reasons was self-doubt. What if she was wrong? It had been a long time since she had drawn a profile, much less a good one. And she had been wrong about so many things and so many people. She had misjudged her own psychologist, for crying out loud. In his office, Cooper has summarily informed that if Red was going to act like it was all business as usual, then so should they while also attempting to uncover who their mysterious imposter was. Liz could live with the last part.

  


Since Ressler had to join Aram while the two dug into their blacklister’s digital footprint, Liz found herself alone in their shared office. It offered the perfect opportunity to use her credentials to covertly access VICAP. Her sleuthing quickly led her nowhere. She had found no murder of an entire family in the DC area that fitted her hastily drawn profile. She widened the search to national and it similarly got her nowhere. It seemed she had been wrong, after all. She had to add this latest instance to the growing pile of things she had misread. Disappointment mixed with anger flooded her. When telling the parable of the farmer, Red could have easily referred to Stanley, the Stewmaker, just like she had initially thought. And he was perhaps merely playing with her in hinting at a lost family.

Dully and with her momentum already gone, she opened a few online archives of old newspapers.

_Terror in The Suburbia. Mother and Daughter Brutally Murdered on Christmas Eve_

The article accompanying the title was rather short, given the sensational topic. Next to it was only a grainy picture of a house that could have been anywhere in America. There was no exact address, only that it had happened in Takoma Park. They gave no name for the daughter, only the mother – Tara Scott. It had happened on Christmas Eve, in 1989, the year of the fire that had changed her from Masha Rostova to Elizabeth Scott, Sam’s adopted daughter. Scott…. It couldn’t just be a coincidence. It had to mean something.

She leaned back in her chair. Hide in plain sight indeed. Or not so plain sight. Why wasn’t the murder in VICAP?

Remembering that Red had eyes and ears everywhere, she got up and pulled on her jacket. Leaving a digital trail of her investigation was a bad idea. She needed to think outside the box and go old school if her hunt was to remain undiscovered. Her FBI badge should open enough doors at the Takoma Park Archives for her to find out more about Tara Scott and her daughter.

A couple of hours later she had mixed results to show for her efforts. Tara Scott had been born Tara Wilson in Boyne City, Michigan. There was a death certificate on record for her but none on her daughter. In fact, there was no paperwork whatsoever on the child. As if she had never existed. No birth certificate. No hint at a first name. Nothing on a husband, either. Not on paper. Tara Scott’s old house in Takoma Park no longer stood. It had been destroyed in a gas explosion three and a half months after the man claiming to be Raymond Reddington had surrendered to the FBI. Yeah, this looked increasingly less like a coincidence. Tara Scott, nee Wilson, had a sister still residing in Boyne City, Michigan. Liz had a whole weekend until her undercover stint with Red on Tuesday. So on Friday after work, she left her phone and car at home. She purchased a burner in case she needed to contact anyone and got a car off Craig’s List. She wasn’t looking forward to the twelve hour drive to Michigan but if was the only way to travel without leaving a track.

* * *

After resting and showering in the less touristy motel she could find, Liz put on her black leather jacket over a black T-shirt and black jeans and went to inquire about Tara Scott’s sister with the local police. The desk sergeant on duty knew her – Ava Miller, nee Wilson. The Millers owned a bait shop by the lake… Lake Charlevoix, that was. She, her husband and her three sons, two of them married with families of their own, were good people, and the local policeman was surprised Liz wanted to speak to her in connection to a classified federal case. Still he gave her an address and promptly informed her Ava would most likely be home on a Saturday, while her husband went fishing with friends and the younger son. An FBI badge got one a long way in small town Americana.

Ava Miller lived in a blue-gray, single family home with the American flag flying over a covered porch that had bright orange plastic lawn furniture. Liz knocked on the front door and waited. The quest to find the real identity of the man posing as someone else in order to become the Concierge of Crime had certainly led her to a most unexpected place. She had driven through downtown while searching for the police station and she had been unimpressed. Boyne City had a certain amount of Midwestern charm but otherwise, it was nothing but a provincial family and fishing resort town with a handful of historic buildings that were even more modest than the ones she had seen in the string of cities she had passed on her way there.

Her disappointment mounted when she saw who opened the door.

“Ava Miller?” Liz asked in her best formal tone and flashing her badge.

The other woman nodded, her warm brown eyes widening at the sight. She was in her early sixties and looked it, fine lines crossing her wide, fair-skinned face with Midwestern features. She was a bottle blonde with shoulder long hair, wearing a fawn-colored combo of pants and blouse and clearly fake pearl earrings. Liz had seen enough lookalikes populating the school halls at talent shows and PTA meetings back in Nebraska. Perhaps this was all just a massive coincidence and Liz had driven for over twelve hours the night before for nothing. Ava Miller couldn’t possibly know anything of the man pretending to be Raymond Reddington.

Ava Miller invited Liz in a narrow, not so well lit living room that had a bad case of pastel going on in addition to an overdose of family pictures. A giant case of school trophies, most of them seemingly for sports events, took up half a wall. Liz took the proffered seat on a worn brownish leather couch and refused an offer of coffee or club soda. Ava Miller sat across from Liz and looked at her hopefully.

“You’re here about Tara and Ellie, aren’t you?”

Liz supposed her best bet was to confirm it.

“I thought this might happen. Jeff… my husband told me not to get my hopes up but I watch CSI, I’ve seen all the new technology the police and the FBI have these days. I knew you’ll eventually break the case. That’s how you say it, isn’t it?”

Liz nodded encouragingly. So they had never caught Tara Scott and her daughter’s killer. “I wouldn’t say we’ve broken the case yet but we have reopened and we are investigating…. Out of curiosity, Mrs. Miller, do you watch any real crime shows?”

“No, I’ve had more than enough true crime in my own life.” She grasped a tissue from the nearby coffee table and padded at her eyes with it. “I mean, my own sister and niece were murdered… on Christmas Eve too….”

Red was apparently right. From DC social butterflies to Midwestern housewives, nobody had any idea who was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. It was most likely how he had managed to skate by without anyone from his real past recognizing him.

“Mrs. Miller,” Liz began adopting a good cop demeanor. “As you must realized, your sister’s is a cold case. A lot of information was lost in the cogs of bureaucracy. Most of what we have hasn’t aged well, anyway. So practically I have to start from scratch. That’s why I came to see you. I need everything you can tell me about your sister and your niece.”

“There isn’t much to tell really.” She got up and picked up one of the many frames scattered around the room. “This is the house Tara and I grew up in. Our Dad worked at a car wash his whole life, Mom was a maid at the Water Street Inn. Tara was the sweetest person you’d ever meet. She was so gentle, caring, always had a kind word for everyone. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”

Liz took the pictures Ava handed her. One was fuzzy and depicted a scrawny, blonde, long haired teenagers in jeans posing by some green pasture. The another was of the same person sporting now a June Cleaver haircut and wearing a flower print, flowing dress with those ridiculous, over sized ‘80s shoulder pads. She was holding a toddler with a halo of flaxen curls around her head. Both mother and child were oddly familiar to Liz, though she couldn’t quite place them. The third picture had a nicer, silvery frame. It was a wedding photograph. In an instant Liz understood how he could so sure nobody from his past would recognize him. He had indeed changed. He did use to have a teeming mane – golden brown in color, and his face, devoid of wrinkles, was more angular, as if he was thinner. And his smile… it was the same megawatt one, showing off his teeth, but it was almost shy. The most striking – and shocking difference – however, was his obvious innocence. It was more readily apparent than his youth, for he seemed barely out of his teen. It was what made all the difference. The man in that photo was eons away from the one who had so effortlessly dominated a room full of FBI agents, including an Assistant Director, a few days ago. None of the world weariness, confidence and sheer power of the Concierge of Crime was present in the young man who was ducking his head in his own wedding photo as if intimidated by the mere presence of the camera. But Liz would know those eyes anywhere.

Liz knew who the man posing as Raymond Reddington was. He was a man whose wife and daughter had been murdered on Christmas Eve, 1989.

  



	19. What Happens after I Love You

All I have, all I need, he's the air I would kill to breathe  
Holds my love in his hands, still I'm searching for something  
Out of breath, I am left hoping someday I'll breathe again  
I'll breathe again.

Open up next to you and my secrets become your truth  
And the distance between that was sheltering me comes in full view  
Hang my head, break my heart built from all I have torn apart  
And my burden to bear is a love I can't carry anymore.  
( _Sara Bareilles, Breathe_ _A_ _gain_ )

  


_Now_

Liz wiped at her tear stained face with the back of her hand. “If I was you, I wouldn’t believe it either,” she said and sat back a little, not getting up from her knees. “I’m not noble like you are. I can’t just take your anger, regardless of how it makes me feel. I can’t accept whatever you’re willing to give me. I can’t be whatever you want or need me to be. I need to be forgiven. I know I don’t deserve it but I’d rather have your punishment than your indifference.”

Red was staring at her strangely. “I think I inhaled opium and I’m now too high to remember it. Why else would you call _me_ noble?”

“Because you are,” she replied fervently. “And in so many ways a better person than I am. Self-sacrificing and not wanting anything for yourself. But I am selfish. I have to have your forgiveness.”

His gaze petrified before her eyes. “No!” The word was laded with ironclad resoluteness. “You took away my mission. You got my friends killed. You essentially destroyed me. Congratulations, Elizabeth, you attained your goal. This is what you wanted, isn’t it? My refusal to forgive you is all you have left me with. So I intend to keep it. I traded myself for you time and time again, I laid my heart, my soul at your feet and you trampled them to your liking. I gave and gave and you just took and took….” His hands formed fists at his sides. “But monster or not, even I have a limit. This time I will not give and you cannot take. Forgiving you is mine and you can’t have it! Now get out. I’m paying you to spend time with Agnes, not you.”

She didn’t stir, though his words had cut deep. As deep as she had to have cut him so many times in the past. He was right. She had pushed and pushed and now she got she wanted: though still there, he had essentially left her. She had never regretted her actions and her venomous words to him more than she did in that instant. “I don’t want any money.”

“And I don’t want any relationship with you that goes beyond strictly business.”

Liz looked at him, at the marble coldness of his stony face and whispered: “You loved me once.”

He winced. “No, I did not. I wanted to love you almost as much as I wanted you to be the woman I saw in you. I was in love with a chimera, a desire for light and a way home. But Dembe was my light in the dark, the one oasis of honesty and goodness in the night had inhabited me. You were like the kaleidoscope. I kept looking at you hoping for a beautiful prism of color but instead all I kept getting was a broken mirror of blackness. For the longest time I denied that truth. I am tired, Elizabeth, more so than you can fathom. I can no longer run away from the real you because if I don’t accept who you really are, then one day and it might come soon, I will be standing over Dembe’s grave too. I’ve done you wrong as well. I am all too aware of it. I don’t know if the times I’ve saved you balance out all that I wrought upon you. Maybe without my protection you would have been long dead. Perhaps that would have been best for everyone involved. It would have certainly been best for my mission. I curse that moment of weakness and grief when I decided you were all I had left that wasn’t a cold and indistinct goal and that I would anything to protect you but I cannot turn back time and change my unforgivable lapse in judgment. I took a lot from you and you have taken from me everything your parents missed. As I face your awful truth I must also face mine. I can never again be what and who I once was. I am monstrous, damned and deformed. I deserve to be alone at the bottom of a light deprived cave. There is no ray that can make me less hideous. There is but the little speck of warmth Dembe so generously provides for me. Other than that, all I wish for, especially from you, is to be left alone with my misery and the ghosts of those I’ve killed.”

Liz balled her own hands into fists, her fingernails biting into the skin of her palms. “No! I gave up on us too many times while you refused to. Now it’s my turn. You may have given up on us and I can understand why but I haven’t.”

His bark of laughter was sardonic and cruel, scratching at her hearing. “In the immortal words of Rhett Butler, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Liz slowly pulled to her feet. Her knees were aching. She had really hit the floor hard. “I’ve said far worse to you and you didn’t budge. I’m not leaving, either.”

His eyes flashed as she drew nearer. She could practically sense the predator in him rising. This was a dangerous game she was playing. But if this was what it took to obtain even a minuscule fleck of forgiveness, then she was all in.

“Why would you stay with someone so old and repellent?” he said slowly, deliberately. Every word seemed calculated to hurt.

“When have I ever…?” she paused as the memory surfaced. “This is about what I said on that golf curse?” She sighed. “I didn’t mean anything by it,” she besought. By now she was standing right in front of him. Her fingers itched to touch him but she restrained herself. “I was just… I don’t even know what I was thinking at the time but it was not to imply you’re decrepit.” She blew a heavy breath. “Still it was thoughtless of me. I’m sorry. Really! I’m not just saying it. Nor am I lying. Not this time.”

Doubts was etched on his face. His gaze darkened further. Instead of calming him, her words had only stoked his ire. She remembered this scene well only that their roles were usually reversed. It was highly unpleasant to be on the other end of it. She felt as though she couldn’t reach him and make him hear her, no matter how hard she tried. She wondered just how wonderful and resilient and selfless this man was that he had managed to withstand this for years and still come to her aid, putting her needs above his. And how blind she had been to fail to recognize this in him! To appreciate him at least if she could not reciprocate his sacrifices and affection.

“You once told me I’m damaged. You’re right, Elizabeth, beyond your wildest imagination,” he said almost gleefully. “But you have not seen the most revolting thing about me yet.”

Before Liz could utter a single word in reply, he wiped his hoodie over his head, revealing he had nothing underneath. Then he turned around and Liz’s entire world screeched to a halt. His back was composed of shallow valleys and raised hills of misshapen, faintly discolored tissues that had once been human skin. The vines of scars stretched to his freckled shoulders.

_Fire… tall flames consuming everything, even her dolls… smoke, black and choking… and the steady hand on her shoulder guiding her out of the inferno, shielding her from the sparks falling from above under a coat while the tall, dark silhouette walked by her side… where he had always been… a shadow hulking over her not to wreak havoc on her life as she had thought but to protect… always to protect her… since she had been a small child…._

“You… it was you… not my father. You took me out of the fire. You saved me.”

He still had her back to her. “No, your father was already dead by then,” he confirmed, his voice low and abrasive.

She frowned, delving deeper into the memory. “The sparks… they fell on your clothes and they caught fire….”

He didn’t respond. Liz’s right hand came up, her fingers trembling. Her heart was beating a maddening staccato. “Do they hurt? The scars….”

“No. Most of the nerve endings are gone, anyway.”

He had to have suffered deep tissue burns for that to happen. To think of the agony he had endured. The possible infections ensuing from the severity of the wounds. The complications. The meds….

“They gave you morphine for the pain, didn’t they?” she asked as he was shrugging his hoodie back on.

He didn’t reply to that and Liz quickly lowered her hand, when she was that he was turning to face her again. She lowered her eyes, ashamed. “That’s how your addiction started,” she concluded.

“Yes, Elizabeth. Now that I’ve ripped the mask, you’ve seen the full horror of the monster. The depth of my disfigurement.”

Liz blinked away tears as she took in his face. His painfully handsome face, drawn and pale from suffering. Her heart broke for him. “I was wrong,” she whispered harshly, angry beyond reason. This time at herself. “You’re not damaged.” She raised a hand to touch his cheek but he pulled away, not allowing their skin to make contact. “You’re strong and beautiful. And I love you. It’s not guilt. It’s not gratitude. But I do know that I don’t deserve you. That I’ve wronged you one time too many. That I’m too late…. What you just tried to do is not gonna work, however. Your scars don’t disgust me. They fill me with shame for the way I’ve treated you. For every insult, every ingratitude, every blow, every betrayal…. Because you see, my love, you might be damaged but so am I. I’m even more incapable of accepting help and your risking your life for me was something I couldn’t grasp until… until it didn’t matter anymore. Still I’m glad… I’m glad you learnt to accept help… and Dembe’s protection and devotion. I’m happy for you.”

He canted his head to the side, his upper lip curling into a snarl. “Why the change of heart, Elizabeth?”

“There was no change of heart, only denial. I’ve loved you for far long than I’ve known.” She smiled wryly. “I’ll go and let you rest.”

She was at the threshold when he called after her.

“Elizabeth….”

She whirled around quickly, her chest full of hope. “Yes?”

His eyes were wet and hard to read. “Nothing.”

* * *

Liz found her old apartment with its locks changed. She went to the first floor to talk to her landlord, already overcome by a bad feeling. He opened the door but a sliver, a chain blocking the way in. She did not like her odds here.

“All your stuff’s in storage,” he informed her briskly. “I expect a full reimbursement for what I’ve paid to stock them instead of just dumping them in the middle of the street like I should have.” A slip of paper floated towards her feet. Liz suspected it was the address of the storage unir.

“Mr. Bennet, this is a breach of our lease agreement,” she warned.

He glared at her. “So is Homeland Security ransacking one of my apartments looking poison. A whole week the place was decked in yellow tape. I lost three tenants as a result. So I did a quick google search on you, something I should have done before allowing you in my building. And guess what? You used to be wanted for treason and terrorism.”

“I was cleared of all charges,” Liz pointed out.

“Obviously they made a mistake. Anyhow, you’re evicted. I don’t want you in my building. If I could, I’d keep you from ever crossing my street. You can sue me, of course, but somehow I doubt you’ll find a judge in Housing Court to back you up. Now get lost!”

With that he shut the door in her face.

“Deja-vu,” Liz muttered, grabbed the storage address and left.

A short trip to the bank later, she found out her accounts were still frozen. It had also been strongly suggested to her that she took her business elsewhere. It had all happened presumably as a result of the investigation into her alleged poisoning of Red. Since she had been cleared, the situation should have resolved itself by now but Liz guessed Admiral Wilkes loved her little punishments. She drove the car she had borrowed from Dembe – hers was still impounded – back to Isabella’s house. She was not looking forward to the awkwardness that was sure to follow what had occurred between her and Red the night before. She liked the fact that she was stuck there for the foreseeable future even less.

No sooner had Liz stepped into the house that she heard laughter. Lots of it. She found everyone gathered at Isabella’s large dining table. Everyone plus a guest: Jennifer. And she was holding Agnes in her arms. The laughter died the second Liz walked in.

“And that’s my cue to leave,” Jennifer commented acidly, passing Agnes to Dembe who was sitting next to her. Agnes started to cry trying to reach for her half aunt again. Jennifer tapped a finger on the little girl’s nose. “I hope to see you again, kiddo. Don’t cry.” She turned to Isabella as Liz was just telling her sister she didn’t have to go. Jennifer ignored her. “Thank you for your hospitality, Isabella. It was nice meeting you and your daughter.” Finally she turned to Red, pecked him on the lips and briefly squeezed his right shoulder. “I’m glad you’re better, Kenneth. Don’t be such a stranger next time, will you?”

Red smiled at her and got up as well. “I’ll walk you out.”

Jennifer grinned, eyeing him like he was delicious candy. “Always the gentleman.”

When they passed her, Jennifer cast Liz a cold look of warning when she would have reached for her. As if to confirm Jennifer’s earlier words, Red helped her into her coat before they went out. Jennifer had changed. Her hair was shorter, curling artfully around her face, and Liz could swear she had gotten highlights: golden ginger ones. They were becoming and matching her bright, coral colored lipstick. Liz had never seen her sister wear lipstick before. She was wearing a pleated black skirt and knotted white and red top, making Liz self-conscious about her typical jeans, plain T-shirt and leather jacket ensemble. She couldn’t remember the last time she had voluntarily worn something different.

Seeing as Agnes was still crying, she tried to put Jennifer and her surprising familiarity with Red out of her mind and went to comfort her child. When she attempted to take Agnes from Dembe, though, the girl only wailed louder. Liz sighed.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're playing Lizzington bingo, everyone. I've got "Liz sees Red's scars". Get ready for an upcoming "Red and Liz dance".


	20. The Girl Who Wasn’t There

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: some gore and disturbing themes ahead.

Oh, there's no place like home for the holidays _  
_ 'Cause no matter how far away you roam _  
_ When you pine for the sunshine of a friendly gaze _  
_ For the holidays you can't beat home sweet home! _  
_ (Perry Como, _There’s No Place Like Home for The Holidays_ )  
  


_Now_

Red stopped the car and looked at the garden in front of Isabella’s house. Agnes and Elle were playing under their mothers’ supervision, beneath the benevolent rays of the late afternoon sun. The rays glided off Agnes’ hair splayed upon her back. The light almost changed the chestnut locks to golden ones. In a blink of an eye, everything switched. Agnes’ curls became wavy and longer. Her face shifted, taking on a new shape while her eyes became a perfect match for his own. The air filled with soap bubbles that were as fragile as that image of now long-lost domestic happiness.

His hands clenched on the wheel so hard his knuckles ached. A splitting pain pierced his skull forcing him to close his eyes for a few seconds. When he opened them again, Agnes looked like herself once more. It hit him.

_Get out…. Make him go away…. This is my daughter!_

Elizabeth’s angry voice lashed at him sharply, echoing from the distant yet always raw memory of the day Agnes had been born and her mother had betrayed him. She was right. His place wasn’t with them. It had never been. Agnes wasn’t his daughter. His daughter was dead. He revved the engine back to life again and drove off. His head was still sore but not more so than his heart.

He had no idea how he ended up in Clarendon. He just found himself in front of the building where he had gotten Jennifer an apartment. Unlike her sister, she had had no trouble accepting it. He parked the car and went in. The doorman, who recognized him, replied to his greeting idly. He took the elevator to the penthouse, his head still feeling like one open wound. He rang the doorbell.

Jennifer’s face lit up when she saw him but the corners of her mouth dropped when she got a better look of his expression. Wordlessly she stepped aside allowing him in then closed the door. A moment later, her arms wrapped around him.

* * *

Liz watched Red drive away with a sinking feeling. It sparked something within her. A memory. She had similarly watched him drive away after he had rescued her from her Kirk following her botched fake death. He had worn a not so different expression then. It hit her. In an instant she understood where things between her and Red had gone wrong: in the back of an ambulance while she was about to play dead in the most literal sense of the word. Nothing had been the same between them after that. She could count the number of times he had called her Lizzy since then on the fingers of one hand. The warmth he used to have in his eyes when gazing at her appeared less and less. As did the little touches, the lopsided smiles, the conspiratorial sense of intimacy, the reaching out to her, the stories of fish, calling her his light, his second chance, his way home…. A wide chasm had gaped between them and she had been too blind to see it. Not until it became an abyss. Could they ever cross it again?

* * *

_Christmas Eve, 1989_

The lights of a police cruiser painted the freshly snowed landscape of his home street in streaks of red and blue, reflecting off the facades of the houses. He stopped, breathing hard from the effort of having just walked almost five miles in the snow, and stared ahead, as his heart started to speed up. For one moment of abject terror, he thought his job had followed him home and the police car was parked in front of his own home. The cruiser, however, drove all the way to the end of the street, from where a way too loud rendition of _Last Christmas_ reverberated all the way to him. It seemed that Jenners had thrown their by now traditional, exceedingly noisy Christmas Eve party and, again as usual, the neighbors had called the police. He grinned and dusted the snow off the fake fur lining the hood of his coat. It was nice that the neighborhood had traditions.

It has stopped snowing several minutes ago and the air was crisp and frigid. All in all, if one ignored the presents for his family still in his car abandoned by the side of the road just outside Takoma Park and the fact that he was late on Christmas Eve because he had forgotten to put in gas, it was a lovely, postcard worthy winter wonderland. He grinned again, giddy and itching to get home. He loved Christmas. He had always loved Christmas. That love had waned after his mother had passed away only to be revived when he had started his own family, for his wife shared his enthusiasm for the holiday. He was happy that he got to spend this particular Christmas with his family, after all. The weight of his service weapon at his lower back was a stark reminder as to why he had left work so late on Christmas Eve. On a normal day, though, it didn’t bother him that much. Many people had dangerous jobs but his afforded him the privilege of safeguarding everything he loved, of doing something important, something that mattered. He was proud of doing his duty. What he had might not be much by some people’s standards, but he had seen enough of the world to realize it was everything and could never be taken for granted.

By the time he had reached his front door, the police had put an end to the party up the street and _Last Christmas_ had faded, plunging the block into an eerie kind of silence. The door wasn’t locked but that wasn’t unusual in their neighborhood especially on Christmas Eve with all the carolers milling about. The light from the living room spilled into the hallway, as did the smell of fresh pine and oyster stew. His wife had to have already set the table. There was no sound from the piano, though. He wondered if his daughter had already fallen asleep, resigned to her daddy not being home on Christmas Eve. He sighed as he removed his coat, hoping that was not the case. He decided to be stealthy and sneak in to surprise them.

He was already picturing the stunned expression on their faces when he went into the living room. It hit his nose before he saw it. The smell was pungent and impossible to take for something else. It filtered through that of food and of the tree. The salty, copper tinged aroma of blood. And then he saw it…. Blood. There was blood everywhere. As his boot stuck to the floor, he dimly realized he had to have stepped into it as well. All he could see was blood. It was everywhere. Even caked in her long, golden hair sprawled on the floor right below the festively wrapped gifts arranged beneath the tall Christmas tree draped in glittery, silvery tinsel, colorful baubles and oversized, red ribbons.

Someone gave a low, anguished cry that resounded against the walls of the house. He thought it had come from his daughter. That she was just coming down the stairs only to discovery the same gruesome scene he did. He turned and flipped the corridor lights on too. There, towards the entrance to the kitchen he saw more blood. It was even sprayed on the cream-colored walls. Some of it had even landed on the large poinsettia in the corner. Its flowers were of the same shade as the precious, vital liquid spilled all over his family home.

He rushed to the small body so still on the hallway floor. His daughter was wearing a pale blue and white satin dress with a giant bow at her waist. The material was saturated in blood. He gathered her in his arms, rocking her against his chest. Her face no longer looked human. Only her wavy, blond hair was recognizable. He kissed her on it calling her name over and over. To no avail. No answer was forthcoming, from the small, rigid bundle in his arms, or from the living room, where his wife lay just as unmoved. He staggered to his feet, his child’s body still in his arms, and ambled back to Tara.

It wasn’t grief what he felt. It went beyond it. An abyss gaped at the bottom of his being and it deepened with each breath he took. It threatened to swallow him whole. He hoped it did. He hoped he could not withstand it and that he would die with his wife and daughter. He laid the little girl’s body next to that of her mother. Tara’s eyes were wide open and full of horror, staring emptily at the ceiling. The gash at her neck was so wide and deep it all but severed her head. Her chest was a mass of blood and torn flesh mixed in with the garment of her dress. Crimson rivulets were running down the milky skin of her naked arms. He wanted nothing more than to lie next to them and close his own eyes forever. There was nothing for him in this world without them. No place he would rather be than in a grave with his wife and daughter.

Then he heard it. The sound of hushed voices coming from the back of the house. The pouring of heavy footsteps from the direction of the back door. The Smith & Wesson 645 at his lower back weighted on his mind again. Darkness erupted within him, consuming him entirely not leaving even the possibility of light. It sharpened the desolation of loss with a new purpose. He sprang to his feet, his adrenaline spiking, momentarily overcoming the despair, as his training kicked in. He slipped through the house without making a sound, zeroing in on the voices. He didn’t focus on making out any words. He didn’t need them. All he needed to know was that the weapon in his hand was loaded. He also knew that, though he had never done it before, not even in the line of duty, now he would kill. He felt acutely in his veins. Finding his way through his own home, even in the dark, as the intruders had not turned on the light, was easy. He could sneak on them undetected. And then he would do it. He would kill. That was all he wanted to do. To take the roaring of the blood in his ears and the whirlwind of devastation feasting on his soul and inflict them on somebody else. To make someone pay for him walking into a house of blood on Christmas Even only to find his family slaughtered inside.

The flashlight blinded him but it did not stop his finger from squeezing the trigger. The flashlight clattered to the floor as the intruders turned and ran before he could see their faces. He fired again blindly following them through the darkened part of the house to the back door. He stumbled out in the snow as the strangers scampered away, and kept shooting, shattering the calm of the famously silent night. He didn’t even realize he was discharging his weapon in a crowded, civilian neighborhood. He just kept firing, trying to follow the men, stumbling into the thick layer of snow in his backyard, until the gun was empty and he fell to his knees into the frosted mass. He heard a siren echoing nearby. The police cruiser that had come to break up his neighbors’ clamorous Christmas Eve party had to have heard the shooting. He let the gun drop from his nerveless fingers and tipped his head towards the vast ocean of darkness above his head. The skies above seemed distant, cold, unfeeling, though the architect of his family’s tragedy was here on earth and he would find them and make them pay, even if it took the sacrifice of his very soul. It didn’t matter how far he would have to descend into darkness or that he might never see the light again, but he would learn what had happened to his family. That he vowed.

* * *

“That better not be work,” Corinne Wilkes’ husband warned.

Heading down the corridor to the phone, she said not one word in reply. She understood his sentiment. _Winter Wonderland_ was playing and it just so happened they had a real one outside too. Their house echoed with excited cries of their children and smelled of roasted turkey and her signature coconut lavender cream cake. However, what she did for a living had no respect for anyone’s holidays. She just hoped it wasn’t about the Reddington case. She had just about enough of that mess and didn’t want it ruining her Christmas. Besides, it wouldn’t be just her Christmas that it would ruin, it was that of her best man’s too. And he should be in the middle of his oyster stew dinner too by now. He hadn’t shut up about it all week. Apparently, though, Raymond Reddington couldn’t just stick to ruining his own family’s life.

She picked up the receiver.

“Commander Wilkes?” said the all too nervy yet familiar voice of her new assistant. The man had little stomach for their harsh business so she foresaw an incoming transfer in his near future.

“Yes?” she replied sternly. She would kill him if this was a false alarm.

There was a long pause on the other end that severely tried the patience she normally had much more of. The silence was followed by a heavy sigh. “Commander Wilkes…. The Day Manger was compromised.”

She gripped the phone receiver so hard through the ensuing, curt report that the plastic creaked from the stress.

* * *

_Now_

Jennifer ran a hand over her face. She was white as a sheet. “Does my sister know?” she asked.

He squeezed the tiny, plastic bracelet in his hand. “She doesn’t know everything.”

“My anger at her aside, what are you gonna to do?” Jennifer asked sincerely. “I mean… this is… this is….” She waved a hand in front of her, obviously at a loss of words.

“This story isn’t about Elizabeth. She’s incidental in it.” He sighed and paused to look out the window at the tranquil neighborhood down below. “As for what I’m gonna, I’ll do what I should have done the day your niece was born. I would have spared myself and those close to me a lot of torment that way. I will walk away. I will keep paying Elizabeth. History has indicated she’s not very good at taking care of herself… or of her daughter. Sooner rather than later they would need the money. But I will extricate myself from their lives. It may have taken me years and it may have come at a great personal cost but I’ve finally realized what Elizabeth has been trying to tell me all along. I don’t belong with her. She and her daughter aren’t my family.” He looked to Jennifer when she reached to him and grasped his free, left hand. “Nor are they gonna replace my lost one. I want to go home, to gravitate towards light, to emerge from the darkness that overtook me that Christmas Eve but I cannot find any of that with Elizabeth. I don’t even wish to, anymore.” He lifted Jennifer’s hand to his lips and deposited a small kiss on her knuckles which earned him a wan, timid smile from her.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the delay in posting this chapter, everyone. I am really busy in real life. Thank you for your lovely comments on the previous one; they were greatly appreciated. Please, don't forget to drop me a word with what you thought of this one. Good, bad, I welcome it all.


	21. Seeing Red

When all the stars are falling down Into the sea and on the ground   
And angry voices carry on the wind   
A beam of light will fill your head   
And you'll remember what's been said   
By all the good men this world's ever known   
Another man is what you'll see   
Who looks like you and looks like me   
And yet somehow he will not feel the same.  
(The Moody Blues, _Melancholy Man_ )

 

_Now_

The melody trickled through the house, soft and filled with delicacy and immense sadness. Liz followed the notes to the small, dark piano Dembe’s daughter kept nestled in a corner of her living room. With his back to her, Red played. She had no idea he was musical. Leaning against the door frame, Liz wondered how many were the things she had missed out about him by continuously rebuffing him every time he had tried to open his soul to her. She swallowed over a suddenly dry throat. Would she ever get a chance to make up for all the time she had foolishly wasted them?

The music stopped abruptly and his back that was clad only in a white shirt stiffened. Liz remembered the horrific scars that were not obscured by the pristine material and shuddered. He was burnt, hurt because he had saved her. He had lost everything many time over because he had saved her.

“Is there something I can help you with, Elizabeth?” he asked coldly, formally.

“I didn’t know you could play the piano,” Liz said.

“There are many things you don’t know about me, Elizabeth. Even more you didn’t want to know. And you’re not going to find them out now.” He closed the lid over the instrument and got up, only half turning to her.

“The piece was beautiful. What’s it called? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.”

“No, you would have never heard it before,” he replied enigmatically and collected a small, fawn brown notebook and a pen from the piano, implements Liz was only now noticing.

She frowned, considering him and his rigid posture. She could only see his profile but it was enough to note the downward curve of his lips and twitch in his cheek. He was deeply displeased. As if she had caught him in a private moment he had wished undisturbed.

“You,” she started in disbelief. “It’s yours…. You’re composing.”

The twitch in his cheek got worse. He didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. Liz knew she was right on the money.

“You shouldn’t hide that. The… I don’t know what it’s called exactly so I’m just gonna say the song… the song was lovely.”

“Don’t sound so shocked,” he snapped.

“I wasn’t,” she defended. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you fail at anything. Everything you do is masterful.”

He turned to her fully then, his gaze piercing. “Here’s where you’re wrong, Elizabeth. I’m looking at my biggest failure right now. And if I had been alone in suffering the consequences, I would have borne it but….” He paused and clicked his tongue audibly. “What more do you want, Elizabeth? What else do you imagine I have left? This?” He held the small notebook protectively against his heart. “This, you cannot have!”

Liz suspected they weren’t talking about music anymore. “I have no idea what that is and even if I did, I wouldn’t be asking for it.”

“Yes, you would. Sooner or later you always ask, whether it’s your lot to know or not. And where has your quest led you, Elizabeth? Where has it led anyone? Are you happy now? Satisfied? Fulfilled? Now you know. Now you’ve destroyed me. Can it be over now?”

The tears on Liz’s cheeks were scorching. “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves,” she quoted.

His lips quivered into an ugly snarl. “I wish I had dug one… after you gave me the Fulcrum. I wish I had done my duty and put a bullet in your head then.”

Liz wasn’t sure whether he meant it or was just attempting to hurt her, inflict some of the pain she had caused him back on her. If that was true, it was working. His words cut deep.

“What happened after I faked my death?” she asked, trembling from head to toe. This would hurt even more but she needed to find out the exact details of where they had gone wrong if she was to figure out a way to fix them. “What did you go through?”

Perhaps it was her imagination but the air in the room grew colder. His face became ghostly pale. “Let the sleeping dogs be, Elizabeth,” he cautioned, his voice lower than usual and eerily calm.

Liz clenched her jaw and stared at him squarely in the eye, not backing down.

“Why tell you when I can show you?”

Liz nodded.

“Wait here then.”

Liz sat down to wait and wait, she did. He came back almost an hour later, this time wearing a black coat over his clothes as well as a black hat. He looked a lot more like the Red she knew. Something else of that Red was back too: the predatory gleam in his eyes. Liz had seen him like this a few times and on every occasion he had seemed positively feral. She was suddenly reminded of something his current depression had obscured for a brief while: this was a very dangerous man. And this was a very dangerous game she was playing.

Red reached into a pocket of his coat, withdrew the contents and set them on the piano next to her.

“What’s this?” she asked, eyeing the vial and the syringe doubtfully. Her heartbeat had picked up.

He stared down at her blankly and didn’t utter a word but merely removed the pale blue cover on the cap of the unmarked ampule. The liquid inside was clear, like water. The plastic crinkled as he removed the syringe from its packaging with quick, deft moves.

A cool shiver crawled its way up Liz’s back. She wasn’t really going to do this, was she?

The needled penetrated the cap of the vial and the strangely looking substance began to dribble into the syringe. Liz’s stomach twisted. Regardless of his name, she had seen this man kill, utter terrible threats and then carry them out. He had even kidnapped her once. Her extremities began to feel chilled.

Red removed the syringe from the vial and tapped a nail a few times against it before he held out the needle in front of Liz’s eyes. His expression was forbidding. He still wasn’t talking. He didn’t have to. Liz knew the two choices that were laid before her. Yet his silence made everything all the more unnerving. She tugged on her lower lips nervously. There was white noise in her ears. He was bigger than her, stronger and a much more adept fighter. However, she believed that if she tried to run, he would let her. After all, she had instigated the whole thing. But if she left now, it might truly be the end for them. At the very least, she would lose a precious opportunity to gain some insight into how to make things right between them. Besides, she recalled, he had trusted her. It was high time she trusted him.

She rolled the sleeve of her blouse up her right arm and extended it to him. Her veins were oddly blue against the paleness of her skin.

Curt surprise registered on his face before he could hide it. He had anticipated her refusal. She felt a burst of triumph that she still managed to astonish him. Her skin prickled as the needle slipped in. She didn’t glance down at it but at his face. He wore a look of concentration as he gave her the injection, his lower lip jutting out in that adorable fashion of his. Despite the dire situation, she still felt absurdly tempted to spring forward and press her mouth to his. She could always blame it on whatever drug he was giving her later. But her mouth suddenly felt like cotton and there was a funny taste on the back of her tongue. Her vision narrowed to a blurry view of his face. She tried to blink it away but she didn’t have enough strength even for that tiny effort. The last thing she knew before tumbling into darkness was his arms wrapping themselves around her body keeping her from toppling face first to the floor. The notion was oddly comforting. Dimly she realized that, no matter the state of their relationship, she had always felt safe in his arms.

* * *

_Six Months Ago_

“What about your sister’s husband husband?”

“What about him?” Red’s former sister-in-law asked as if taken aback by the question.

“Could he have hurt your sister and her daughter?”

Ava Miller’s eyes went wide at the suggestion. “No! No! Kenneth loved Tara and he adored their daughter…. No, just the idea that… I don’t understand. The agent who talked to me thirty years ago said he had definitely ruled Kenneth out as a suspect. He was at work, he had an alibi for the time of the murder. Are you asking me because of how they got married? Look, Tara didn’t want anything. She knew they’d throw him out of the Navy Academy if they found out he had a child. She would have kept the secret. She knew how hard he had worked to get there. Besides, Tara had had a crush on him all throughout high school. All the girls did but they knew he was out of their league. The small town life would have never done it for a guy like him. He had skipped a grade, he was going places and he was dating that college girl from Maine. She was studying at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey, where his mother used to teach. But then she transferred out of state and stopped answering his letters when he went to Annapolis. So when he came back here for the summer after his first year, I guess he was a bit down with his mother passing away the year before and all. Things happened between him and Tara but she understood it was just a summer fling. She just told him about the baby because she thought he had a right to know. Next thing we knew he came back here and told Tara and my parents he wanted to do the right, no matter what it would cost him. I guess you could say their marriage began with a shotgun wedding but they were happy.”

Liz stared at the modest-looking Midwestern housewife before her. The story she was recounting sounded insane, as if spun by the imagination of a grieving woman who in time had mixed up the Harlequin novels she no doubt enjoyed with her dead sister’s tragic life story. This couldn’t be Red she was talking about! The man Ava Miller was talking of was noble to the point of abandoning a surefire Navy career to marry the woman he had left pregnant during a casual fling. That man wasn’t a lying, treacherous, murdering psychopath like the Red Liz herself knew. At least, she had a name. _Kenneth_. Red sometimes used the identity of Kenneth Rathers. He took hiding in plain sight to new heights.

“Your sister’s husband had to give up a dream career and live through the humiliation of being expelled from Annapolis only to return to the small town he had just escaped. All because he felt obligated to your sister. His resentment must have been immense,” Liz reasoned. She remembered what Alexander Kirk had once said: that Red had hurt his own daughter. “It had to have built over the years until one day he just snapped. These things happen. Especially with the compounded stress of a major holiday.”

The other woman shook her head resolutely. “Not Kenneth! I get that some people might do that but…. You didn’t know him. You didn’t see him around Tara. Around Ellie. I know it sounds corny but he and Tara really did fall in love after they got married.” He held up a hand. Her sleeve slipped showing a well worn, orange watchband. “Tara had a miscarriage when Ellie was about eight. Her doctor suggested they should both go to couple’s therapy to help them get over it. Tara jumped on it. She thought it would give them a chance to work on any issues left from how their marriage had started out. Kenneth didn’t want to go. Men usually hate these things. But he went. He up with it for over a year. That doesn’t sound like a man who kills his family on Christmas Eve to me.” She put her hand to her mouth and heaved a heavy breath. “Besides, they never came to live back here again.”

“Where did they go?”

“Back to DC, of course. There was no room for them to live with my parents. My husband and I lived with them and we already had our youngest. His father had an antique shop by the pier but he never did well. We have our fair share of tourists but they’re not often the antiquing kind. Anyhow, I don’t think Mr. Scott was doing it for the money. He just liked to take up old, broken things and fix them. Kenneth helped him sometimes and he had gotten really good at it but his Dad’s place and house were mortgaged like ten times over. They would have crumbled under the debt. So they went back to Washington after the wedding. And you’re wrong about him being expelled. He came clean to the Academy and quit. Kenneth was honorable, just like his father, the old-school kind of honorable you only see in movies these days.”

“Honor alone doesn’t pay the bills, Mrs. Miller,” Liz pointed out. “It must’ve been very hard for them in a city like Washington.”

Ava nodded. “It was… for about a year. Then an old friend of Kenneth’s from the Academy came by and helped him get a job at the Pentagon.”

Alarms went off in Liz’s head. “What kind of a job?”

“Oh, nothing big. He was a clerk or something… yes, a supply clerk. But it paid well. After a while, they moved out of the tiny apartment they were renting and into this nice house. The Pentagon even paid for Kenneth to go to college. To Georgetown!”

“Do you remember what he studied?”

“I’m not sure but I think it was Russian language.”

Liz’s interest was piqued. “The Pentagon paid for a supply clerk to go to Georgetown to study Russian?”

Ava Miller nodded enthusiastically, clearly not realizing what was wrong with the very notion of the Pentagon hiring an Annapolis drop-out in the first place, let alone pay for him to go to school. “Yes, they did. The only downside was that he had to keep really terrible hours. He was often gone at night, worked on holidays, they just called him and he would have to go. But you know how it is, working for the government and all that. And this was the Pentagon! You never knew when a shipment came in or when they wanted more inventories. Tara got used to it quickly, thought. That was Tara for you, Agent Keen! She was the picture of happy-go-lucky. I was never like that. I just wished they could come and visit more. I mean, he could barely take a few days off when his father passed.”

“Remind me, when did his father die?”

“In ‘87. He had a heart-attack.”

“And his mother died when he was still a teenager?”

“Yes. She taught Music at North Central Michigan College in Petoskey. She had a car accident coming home one night. She fell asleep at the wheel.”

Liz’s brain slammed into overdrive. The imposter’s name was Kenneth Scott. By the time his family had been murdered, he had no more living relatives, since his parents were already dead and it didn’t seem like he had any siblings. The wife and daughter who had cost him his would-be Navy career were the only people standing between him and total freedom.

“Mrs. Miller, you said an FBI agent came to talk to you after your sister’s murder….”

“I didn’t say FBI. Yes, an agent did come by but he wasn’t FBI. He was NCIS… I remember because of the TV show.”

NCIS? How had NCIS gotten involved? It didn’t matter, though. It was a minor mystery. Liz had the whole picture now.

* * *

Liz closed the door to Cooper’s office but not before casting a wary glance through the glass. Then he turned to the three men inside.

“I know who the imposter is.”

“Who?” Aram asked eagerly.

Liz looked from him to Ressler and finally to Cooper. “His name’s Kenneth Scott,” she announced triumphantly. “He was forced to leave the Navy Academy after getting a woman pregnant. I think he fueled his frustration into spying for the Russians. He even managed to infiltrate the Pentagon. My father worked to catch people like him. He must’ve found him out and that’s why he killed him and stole his identity. But not before he murdered his own wife and daughter in cold blood on Christmas Eve.”

Aram’s expression crumbled.

“He’s a traitor,” Liz bit out. “And we’re gonna catch him and end his reign of terror once and for all.”

  
  


 


	22. Return to Cape May

Could you write me just one love song?  
And put my name somewhere in the middle of it  
And if you call the song Elizabeth   
All my friends will know it’s about me  
‘Cause the truth is hard, isn’t it?  
(Airborne Toxic Event, _Elizabeth_ )

  


_One Month Earlier_

The rain came down in heavy drizzles that slid off Liz’s already soaked clothes. The red and blue of the ambulances lit up the dark of the night. Despite the downpour, Liz could hear the low hum of the unmarked helicopters flying just above her head. She turned to Ressler who stood at her side with his head bowed, raindrops running down his face as if they were tears. Less than a foot away, equally drenched Aram and Samar wore twin expressions of horror.

“What have we done?” Ressler muttered, his tone heavy with dread.

The question echoed deep within Liz’s bones. She knew it to be incorrect. The right form was: what had _she_ done?

* * *

_Six Months Ago_

“Scott?” Ressler said frowning and then turned to eye Liz. “Wasn’t that your family name before you got married?”

Liz folded her arms and stared at him defensively. “Yeah. So?”

“The name of your adoptive father was Sam Milhoan,” Ressler pointed out, his blurry gaze hard to decipher. “Isn’t it suspicious than you and the imposter have the same last name? You said it yourself, your step father was a grifter yet when the FBI vetted you before you were admitted to Quantico. they didn’t find anything. Not your juvenile record, nothing. Your background checked clean even though we know now you’re not really Elizabeth Scott. Your social security number, your entire history, everything was solid. No red flags. OPR ran you again when Reddington surrendered and again you came out smelling like roses.”

“My father chose my new name for me,” Liz explained. “He was a highly-respected Navy officer. He obviously had connections. Hence why he managed to craft a new identity for me that would stand up to any scrutiny.”

“I’m not disputing that,” Ressler went on. “You’ve been trained in counter-intelligence just like me, Liz. It’s virtually impossible to create the perfect second identity. Our Witness Protection Program itself can’t do it. That’s how we were able to find Carla Reddington and more recently, Jennifer. You were vetted twice by several agencies and the second time everyone was suspicious of you so they went over your background with an even finer comb. Something should have given. They should have found at least a clue that you were not who everybody, including yourself, believed.”

Liz glared at him. “If you have an accusation to make, Ress….”

Cooper stood holding up a hand. “Nobody’s accusing anyone of anything, Liz,” he said in a conciliatory manner. “But you have to admit that it can’t be a coincidence that you and this man, whoever he is, have the exact same last name.”

Liz wet her lips. Even as Ressler had been speaking, she recognized he was making a valid point. There was something else that had started niggling at her. Ava Miller had called the imposter’s daughter Elle and Ellie. Both were short for Elizabeth. She didn’t share that with her colleagues, though. The knowledge sat heavily at the back of her mind, while her instinct warned her that whatever the name coincidence hinted at was fruit from a poisoned tree.

“Perhaps if we could see Mr. Redd…. Kenneth Scott’s file,” Aram started seeming as ill at ease as Liz felt. “Nobody just disappears.”

“Good point,” Cooper opined. “Did Ava Miller seem to know anything of her bother-in-law’s whereabouts after Christmas of 1989?”

“Not much,” Liz replied. “He called her a few times the year after then they fell out of contact. She thought he just needed time after what happened and would contact her again when he was ready but the years passed and he never tried to talk to her again. We, of course, know why.”

Cooper scrutinized Liz. “You said NCIS investigated the murder of the Scott family. I’ll try and cash in a few favors, see if we can’t get the file. That should answer at least a few questions.” He paused and took an audibly deep breath. “Especially as we know who the culprit is.” Cooper appeared to be oddly uneasy about that last part. Nobody commented on it, though.

Liz nodded. She had a few favors to cash in herself. Perhaps her own connections could turn up to be fruitful as well.

* * *

_Now_

Liz woke up to darkness. Then as she blinked and tried to clear her mind, she began to take notice of the bleary shapes populating the obscurity. There was a red haze tinging it too. She ran a hand over her face. Her skin felt hot and too tight. Her mouth still tasted funny, in a way she failed to place. She sat up abruptly trying to gauge where she was and almost hit her head on something.

“Miss Elizabeth?”

She turned her head towards the accented voice to discover a tiny old woman gawking at her with owlish, angular eyes. Liz attempted to focus anew and failed. She felt as if she was floating, her head still foggy. She realized she had been lying on a bed… a bunk bed, at that.

The old woman grabbed Liz’s leather jacket from the foot of the bed. “You need go now,” she said urgently. “Mr. Red is waiting for you.”

Liz pushed a strand of her hair from her eyes. Red? Right! Some of what had occurred in Isabella’s house came back in a rush. She went dizzy as she tried to stand, wavering on her feet, and having to hold onto the above bed for support. Somebody coughed not far away.

“What is this place?”

The old woman didn’t reply but merely continued to stare at her, still holding out Liz’s jacket. Liz finally grabbed the garment and the woman helped her put it on. She couldn’t see much in the relative darkness of the place but a suspicion entered Liz’s mind.

“This is a drug den, isn’t it?” Liz whispered, horror creeping in slowly.

After her apparent death, Red had resorted to drugs. Smoke clouded the chamber she was in almost as much as the ambient darkness.

“Opium,” Liz murmured. She dropped back on the bed, this time hitting the back of her head on the bed above. She ignored that ache in favor of that in her heart.

“Red… Mr. Red was here about four years ago… maybe a little less. How long? For how long was he here then?” she asked the other woman as she was once again pushing to her feet. She wasn’t steadier this time.

The woman didn’t answer this time, either. Liz inhaled deeply. The scent that she know recognized as that of opium filled her lungs. A chronology began to form in her mind. Red had held her apparently cold, dead body in the ambulance then shortly thereafter he had come here to numb his pain with opium.

“I’m ready,” Liz told the woman. “Let’s go to Red.”

The Asian woman guided her through a narrow Chinese place, from which, under different circumstances, Liz might have considered ordering.

The fresh air outside was a shock to Liz’s system but it didn’t help clear her head. She understood now what Red had done: he had drugged her. Since the aftereffects were yet to dissipate, it meant that he had been under the influence when he had left the drug den back then. That was right. She had to experience it for herself if she were to learn what had happened to him during what could have been a rather lovely Cuban holiday for her, if it weren’t for the kidnapping at the end.

She scrutinized the street, searching for Red. She found him standing by an elegant, black cab. He wore the same clothes he had worn at Isabella’s but even from that distance he seemed much more haggard. Liz recalled he was still recovering. Compassion filled her heart and she decided to tell him to postpone the whole thing until he felt better. When she reached him, though, she was out of breath, the short walk having drained her of all vigor. She faltered and collided with the compact mass of his chest. Words were suddenly out of reach and she could only let herself be moved as he wrapped a still very strong arm around her waist, opened the car door and ushered her in the shotgun seat. He sat behind the wheel and stretched himself across her body to secure her in place with the seat belt.

He smelled like bergamot and exhaustion. His brief weight across her was heavy and warm but not at all oppressive. She flashed back to when she had hugged him after he had secured her release when they returned from being on the run together. It sent a pang through her. She yearned for an embrace with no strings attached and no agendas. She yearned for the intimacy of their time on the run. She yearned for all the things that could have been and now might never be. She started to weep quietly.

He offered no words of comfort. In fact, he said nothing at all. His profile was inscrutable, his face pale, dark shadows under his eyes. She wondered who it was that was reliving the pain of the past: him or her.

“I buried you,” he finally spoke after a good ten minutes in tension-riddled silence. “I stood above your grave and wished it had been me inside. I’m sure you wished the same too. Your beloved Tom certainly encouraged me in that direction. Was that the plan all along? No, don’t answer. It doesn't matter now, anyway.”

“I have no idea what Tom did while I was in Cuba,” she chocked out. “He never told me.”

“Add that to the list,” be uttered bitterly.

“I will… but I don’t want to talk about Tom now.”

“That’s new.”

“Where are we going?” she inquired, ignoring the barb.

“Cape May.”

It was a punch to the gut. Liz rolled with it. “Why did you go to Cape May?”

“Everyone dies someday,” he said distantly.

The bits and pieces she had gotten recently about what had happened during her faked death merged to form a pictured in Liz’s head. Her stomach lurched. She swallowed over the bile. She understood why he had taken her to her grave after they had returned from Cuba, what he had been trying to tell her while she had refused to listen.

“But you changed your mind,” she hacked out. “You didn’t do it.”

“I don’t remember much of what happened then at Cape May. I was hallucinating the entire time. In fact, I took so much opium, I’m surprised the drug alone didn’t kill me. All I know for certain is what Dembe told me afterwards: Marvin panicked when he listened to my message because he realized I was making what looked suspiciously like final arrangements. So for the first and only time since I told him who I truly was, Dembe went to Willy.”

“Willy?” Liz asked in confusion.

“Admiral Wilkes.”

Though taken aback by the pet name though she was, Liz decided now was not the time.

“Willy sent Emma,” he continued. “She was the one who had the idea to search for me at Cape May. She pulled me from the half frozen waves at the last moment.”

Emma! Another punch to the gut. Only the seat belt kept Liz from doubling over in pain. “How… how can you stand to even look at me? If anyone had done to me what I did to you….”

“You would have boiled them in acid by now,” he added acerbically.

Liz froze. “You know,” she whispered in quiet horror.

“Remember what I told you when you wouldn’t help me save Carla Reddington from Berlin? I told you that someday, if you’re very lucky, you might wonder: at exactly what point did I become this thing? Well, Elizabeth, you’re not at all lucky.”

“I’m also no longer Polaris… your North Star.”

His chuckle was grim and dry. “Polaris isn’t the brightest star in the sky, anyway.”

Liz stiffened. “Which one is it then?”

“Sirius. If a ray of light were ever to make it into my cave, it would have come from it.”

Liz opened her mouth to ask then closed it again. His words stung terribly but she didn’t feel like she had the right ask. She always wanted to know things that weren’t hers to know. She needed to show him she had finally learned that one lesson. She squirmed in her seat. Her head was still fuzzy. She needed to concentrate but she just couldn’t. Not properly. She wanted to know. Had she been replaced? Was that why he said he had never truly loved her? She was on drugs. He should know, he had given them to her. He couldn’t really fault her for her actions. She dug her teeth into her lower lip till she tasted blood. Her short fingernails scratched at her palms. He frowned upon jealousy. He would despise her even more if she showed any of it now, under these dire circumstances. And he didn’t require any more reasons to do loathe her. She had already given him plenty. She felt like she was bleeding to death inside. Or maybe she was just hallucinating. If she had been replaced and if she loved him like she thought, she should be happy for him and wish him and his _Sirius_ the best. She feared it was Jennifer and desperately hoped that it wasn’t and not just because her half-sister hated her for all the right reasons.

The rest of the road to Cape May was spent in silence. Red didn’t elaborate on Sirius. And Liz didn’t ask.  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please, please, do not put spoilers for Season 6 in comments. Not everyone can see it at the same time as the US audience. Do give feedback, though. Thank you.:-)


	23. What Happens in Cape May

Hate me  
Break me  
Let me feel as hurt as you  
Push me  
Crush me  
But promise me you’ll never let us go   
(Eurielle, _Hate Me_ )

  


_Now_

The ocean was frothy as its dull green waves crashed against the pale sands of Cape May. The hotel or inn or whatever it was—Liz wasn’t sure—stood behind them as she stared of the canvass of water before her, thinking of Red telling her of his dream of captaining a ship and the freedom of being out on the open sea. The breeze was cold but Liz ignored it. Inside she felt as if she was burning and her head was still hazy from the drug.

“What happened here?” she asked.

“The fire. Jack’s Shack was built on top of it. It’s where I thought your mother had walked into the waves.”

He was standing right behind her, his voice a breathy rumble breaking against the murmur of the water. She didn’t request he elaborated on his choice of words when it came to her mother’s ultimate fate. She was well beyond such requests now. And if he failed to answer as it was his lot, she was even farther past blaming him for it. She wet her lips, an idea forming into her mind. She took a step into the ocean and then another. The water soaked her shoes then lapped at her jeans clad ankles. It was ice cold, arctic chills shooting up her legs. She shuddered but soldiered on, advancing into the restless waves. Dimly she questioned if this was really her or the drug. The doubt didn’t slow her down.

“Elizabeth, what are you doing?”

He sounded alarmed. She didn’t stop.

“Elizabeth, this has gone far enough. I know I started this and it hasn’t been my best judgment call… Elizabeth, do you hear me? Come back!”

Liz heard him well enough but it didn’t even slow her down. She persevered, her feet sinking into the wet sand that wrapped like treacherous manacles around her ankles, making going forward harder. Frosty drops hit her in the face. It occurred to her again that she wasn’t thinking clearly. That of all the insane things the two of them had done to each other, this was one step too far into the uncanny valley. The water was up to her middle now. She felt frozen from the waist down. She thought of Agnes, scrambles with her hands into the murky liquid that appeared nearly gray now. Still she pushed on. She had done far worse for far more unworthy… for Tom. She had betrayed everyone for the man who had raised a hand to her. She had destroyed the man she truly loved for reasons that still failed her. She had sold out anyone who had ever helped her, forgot Sam for a biological family that had turned out to be nightmarish, abandoned her own child who was most likely better off without her, anyway. She had killed people. In cold blood. And she had callously covered her tracks burrowing from the Stewmaker’s handbook, no less. In what ways was she better than him? He had paid while she had gotten away with murder. Literally and for than once.

She lost her footing, the water now to her chest. A wave wrapped a steely shackle of water around her torso dragging her under. Liz didn’t fight it. Everyone she knew was better off without her. She was the real monster. She loathed herself. She deserted to die. She deserved the undoubtedly horrific vengeance Admiral Wilkes had in store for her. If only Red wasn’t still protecting her. Red, who thought he had to pay her to let him spend time with Agnes. Red, who was her heart, her soul. Red, whom he hurt beyond what words could describe. Water entered her mouth and went down her throat, and up her nostrils, icy and salt like, suffocating her. She realized that in her folly she had miscalculated. She had been arrogant and foolish and presumptuous. As usual. She had taken him for granted yet again. She had assumed he would come for her. But he had reached the end of his rope. And he wasn’t coming. Not this time.

A strong, thick arm wrapped itself around her upper body pulling her back against something solid and offering protection against the violence of the ravenous waves. Liz kicked at the water as she was fighting to get her bearings. Then her head was above water and fresh air replaced the salty water in her mouth and nose. She sputtered and coughed as she was being dragged back and towards the shore. The skies above looked as if they had been carved from lead.

Liz was flopped on her back on the sand, the water so close it was still licking at her soles. She had lost her left shoe somewhere along the way. Red knelt next to her and spat the water that had shot into his mouth while he had pulled her back to safety. He had come for her!

“I’m this close to poisoning myself again,” he hacked out.

Liz started. That was right! He still hadn’t fully recovered. An incursion into half frozen waves couldn’t have done him any good. This needed to get inside urgently.

“We have to...,” she began but was unable to continue as her teeth clashed together almost painfully. She hadn’t realized they had been chattering until then. She felt as if frozen solid.

He grabbed his long, black overcoat from the beach where he had to have discarded it before rushing after her into the water, and draped around her body as she struggled uncertainly to her feet. Her muscles were barely cooperating. She wanted to ask about him but she was weak as a new born kitten and her tongue wasn’t moving. She couldn’t do much moving at all except for the uncontrollable shivering that had overtaken her. It occurred to her dimly that she had to have been in the water longer than she had realized. Her knees buckled and she would have ended up face-first into the sand if he hadn’t caught her and lifted her with surprising ease given his own state. She was in his arms bridal style. Her right temple rested on the soaked cotton of his shirt. She could sense the rapid pumping of his heart in the vicinity of her skin. A thrill that had nothing to do with hypothermia ran through her.

This was so typical for them! Every time something even remotely romantic happened between them, the circumstances were completely and utterly horrible. She rested her cheek against a sturdy muscle on his compact chest. He smelled like the sea and sandalwood. And she should be a lot more worried about the fact that she was slipping into hypothermia shock!

He kicked the door of Jack’s Shack open with his foot, the impact translating into her body and vibrating into her bones. Liz fought to look upwards and at his face. He was breathing hard, his discolored lips parted. His Adam’s apple was moving fast as he took her up a flight of stairs. She just knew his pulse had to be racing and she briefly considered pressing her lips to it to check.

He deposited her on the floor gingerly. “Do you think you can undress yourself?”

She tried for a smile that she desperately hoped it wasn’t coming out as a grimace. “… thought… you’d never ask….”

It was him who grimaced, though, clearly not appreciating the joke. He turned his back on her. “We need to rise your temperature fast,” he said and she heard water running and splashing against the porcelain of a bathtub.

She managed to sit up and rest the weight of her upper body on a bent shoulder. Shrugging out of her jacket was easy enough but her top seemed glued on. She lost her balance, her head whirling. Her nape bobbed on the hard floor and she couldn’t keep in a groan of pain. He spun around and bent over her, the concern evident in his furrowed brown and his darkened gaze.

“Try not to read anything into this,” he said and ripped off her top in one smooth flicker of his wrist.

He had her undressed in no time and supported her up and into the tub. He was a perfect gentleman throughout, trying to keep his gaze from reaching anywhere but her face as much as the situation could allow him. He placed a rolled up towel under her head on the edge of the tub and then rested a large, slightly calloused palm on her forehead.

“Easy… easy now…,” he soothed, his voice thick like syrup.

Liz’s eyes filled with tears he didn’t question her about. Instead he helped her submerge her head under the warm water a few times before standing up. He was dripping wet too and Liz worried about the impact this could have on his health but her throat seemed permanently clogged, no words making it past her lips. It occurred to her that all her life others had cared for her…. Sam, Red, Cooper, even Kate in her own sick, twisted way towards the end…. She wasn’t used to take care of others, which explained the many ways in which she had failed Agnes. Being a mother was all about taking care and she was ill equipped to do so, so common place it was for her to let others do the heavy lifting while she stomped her foot in anger when things didn’t go her way. Making demands, reasonable or not, that was where her forte was.

Tending to someone, least of all Red, yielded the same results with her as allowing a bull into a china shop. Red was the polar opposite of that and with all the delicate care he had shown her over time, whether she deserved it or not, she should have long since realized he wasn’t who everybody thought he was. Instead his actions had an effect Liz was certain he had not intended. They had fed her ego. It was such a high to have a dangerous criminal at her beck and call. It had served to add another layer of entitlement to her already spoiled nature. Whatever Liz wanted, Liz got. And nobody was capable of getting her more than Red. They had both become so marred into this toxic circle, they were perpetuating it even now, when she had crossed one—or twenty—lines too many.

* * *

Even dry and warm, a shiver still wracked through as if coming from some deep, dark and cold place inside of her. Liz knew that place was no metaphor or the aftermath of hypothermia. There was something very dark embedded deep within her, something perhaps darker than the danger in Red. Despite his outward actions, on the inside he was warm and caring. With Liz, it was the other way around. Despite her acting warm and caring on the outside—more or less—on the inside, there was a lot of darkness and callousness. So much so that sometimes she scared herself. She feared being with Agnes. She dreaded the new and yet undiscovered ways she could hurt her long-abandoned and neglected baby girl.

She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror. She was pale and drawn, the constant weight loss of the past few months obvious in her face too. She had been that way before her run-in with the ocean too. Her now dry hair seemed a tone darker by contrast, as it flowed down to her shoulders and lower. Her large, blue eyes held a haunted look. She looked young… and innocent when she felt anything but. She felt ancient and was profoundly guilty.

_What is this thing that I have become?_

She raised her fist and shattered the mirror. Bright red drop spotted the white porcelain of the sink.

A moment or so later Red appeared in the doorway. He was now dry too, clad in his pants, white undershirt with only his jacket over it. He had borrowed her his shirt to wear instead of her ruined top. His face was oddly blank when he took in the spectacle she offered cradling her injured hand while blood and shards spread in the sink and on the floor.

He went to the medicine cabinet and took out a first aid kit. His brow knitted in concentration, his lower lip jutting forward, he inspected her hand for glass, extracted a few small pieces enclosed in her skin, clean her wounds with antiseptic, which stung a little, then bandaged her.

“The wounds are superficial,” he proclaimed as he cleaned up the mess she had made. Business as usual between them. “You only scratched your skin. I don’t expect it to be any nerve damage.”

Liz stood in the middle of the bathroom, still shivering a little every now and then.

“It’s hard to separate reality from the hallucinations I had the last time I was here but it seems I wandered about quite a bit before Emma found me,” he went on, his eyes avoiding hers. “I found some wine in the cellar. Cabernet Sauvignon. I know it’s not to your liking but it’ll warm you up. There are also a few cans that aren’t past their expiration date in the pantry. I warmed some beef stew with vegetables. We both can use the protein intake…. Elizabeth?”

He had finished straightening up and stored away the first aid kit and was now standing right in front of her.

“You still love me, don’t you?” she said, her voice trembling. “You always did… maybe even from the very beginning… I can see that now. But the hurt and the anger didn’t let you feel it again until… just now. If you didn’t love me, you would have let me drown. You would have ended it once and for all. All you had to do was not save me but you couldn’t. You can’t not save me! But you still love me and it pains you…. How can it not? You despise betrayal above anything else and I did it to you so many times… I’m not even sure how many myself.”

He blanched, something dark and terrible in his eyes. Then came the wry smile. “Congratulations, Agent Keen! You’ve profiled me correctly yet again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not at all, Elizabeth. You’ve taken advantage of my feelings and utilized them to your benefit many times but you never instigated them any more than you welcomed them. No, in this I am entirely to blame. You are guilty of a lot of things but not of making me fall in love with you. That was all me. I knew it would spell nothing but disaster, that it was wrong, back then I thought I was unworthy of you too. But once I had started, I couldn’t stop myself. By the time I tried, it was too late, you had stole in too deep and I found myself craving all the things I had thought forsaken for good: home, a second chance, acceptance, warmth, the easy way she used to say _I love you…_.”

“Your wife?” Liz asked tremulously, knowing the answer before he spoke it.

“Not just her,” he whispered. “I never thought it would happen to me again. Not after decades of blood and horror. I thought nobody would ever look upon the monster I had become with anything approaching tenderness. And then I met her… by the Winged Victory at the Louvre… and in her eyes I was never anything but human. She was the one radiant ray of light filtering into the dark cave I had inhabited for far too long…. I never told her the truth and she never asked but for a short time I was Kenneth Scott again… man not monster, less horrible, less scarred. I existed in her light and warmth suffused me. The last thing I could think of was that I would fail to protect her. I was just honoring her choice… I didn’t want to use my power and my money to force not to marry… I never even ask… I never knew until it was too late….”

Liz sat on the edge of the bathtub, her knees to weak to support her anymore. It all made sense now. Why he was insistent on protecting her, how he had correctly identified Tom as a danger to her, emotional and psychological when not physical. He had lost his wife and his daughter. He had lost this woman he was speaking of, despite all the resources he possessed as the Concierge of Crime. So he had become determined not to lose Liz too. That was why he had been so intent on protecting her, with or without her cooperation. He had lost one women he loved because he had respected her wishes. He couldn’t the same happen to Liz as well. He had never been obsessed with or controlling of her. He was merely deeply traumatized. Her injured hand was throbbing but inside her chest there was something far more painful.

“Aren’t you gonna ask?” he said.

Liz shrugged. “I don’t need a name. I know who she is. She’s Sirius, the brightest star in your sky.”

“Twice,” he uttered, his voice cracking through the air like a whip. “Twice I was left with only you in the world. Exactly a year after my family died, I saved you from the fire. Then when _she_ …, Dembe was away fighting his own battles and I never expected him to return. I never wanted him tethered to me through any bond of obligation. So I only had you…. It became imperative to protect at least you.”

Liz on her feet again, as realization dawned. “So you went to the Major and hired me a bodyguard… Tom….”

He nodded. “And he, in turn, only brought me into your life. I’m beginning to fear we’re fated.”

“No, we’re not! You’re just cursed.”

His lips twitched in what might have been either a grimace or a grim smile. “Perhaps I am.”  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in posting new chapters. RL has been hard of late.


	24. The Devil You Don't Know Well Enough

I touch your lips and all at once the sparks go flying __  
Those devil lips that know so well the art of lying __  
And though I see the danger, still the flame grows higher __  
I know I must surrender to your kiss of fire __  
Just like a torch, you set the soul within me burning __  
I must go on, I'm on this road of no returning __  
And though it burns me and it turns me into ashes __  
My whole world crashes without your kiss of fire _  
_ (Hugh Laurie and Gaby Moreno, _Kiss of Fire_ )

_Now_

Liz woke up with a start. She and Red had dined on two cans of awful, extremely salty beef stew with vegetables. He had washed it down with most of the bottle of a super dry and oaky, deep crimson wine Liz had barely touched. He had seemed deep in thought. Figuring he was still processing what had transpired between them earlier, Liz had let him be. Afterwards he had arranged for two makeshift beds for them, ignoring Liz’s insistence that she didn’t mind sharing. Liz had spent a long time listening to his raspy breath, knowing he wasn’t sleeping either, before she had fallen in a fitful sleep. When she had woken up, it was daylight outside and Red was gone.

“Red,” she called out checking the inn’s dining room first only to find it empty of their dirty dishes and looking deserted again.

She took the stairs two at a time as she ascended to the upper floors looking for him.

“Red… Red… Red?”

She opened every door and kicked those she found locked. He was nowhere to be found, the vacant building eerie and filled with the echoes of her increasingly uneasy voice. When she couldn’t find him on the ground level, either, she rushed outside. A thick, milky fog had descended over the place. She could only hear the ocean rumble but not see it. She ran through the fog, her lungs burning and her heart heavy.

“Red! Red… Red… where are you? Red!”

No answer was forthcoming. Finally she remembered to check the car they had come in. The keys were in the ignition, no doubt left there so she could use the vehicle to return to DC, but his phone was missing from the glove compartment. Tears streaming down her face, hot against the cool breeze, she ran back to the beach, calling for him again, though she already knew it was fruitless.

They had shared something the night before. Something truly and profoundly intimate, luminous and intense in a way she wasn’t used to. With Tom, intimacy had been reduced to sex, generally acrobatic and often soulless. With Red she had sensed a connection that far surpassed the skin deep. For once she hadn’t been frightened but opened and willing to plunge into the unknown with him. Apparently it hadn’t gone both ways.

She was on the sand, surrounded by wisps of fog. She wiped at her face. She felt bereft, as if he had left her, which was absurd. They had never been together. That last thought cut particularly deep because she had no right to aspire to a romantic relationship with him after all her betrayals. But her heart wanted what the heart wanted.

* * *

Red dropped like a stone in the chair across the desk from Admiral Corinne Wilkes. She took one look at him.

“Did you sleep with Masha Rostova?” she asked, a panicked edge in her voice.

“No.” Red scratched at the side of his head. “But I did give her every indication that I still loved her.”

“Did you tell her nuclear launch codes too while at it?”

“No but only because I don’t know any.”

She gave him a pointed look. He smiled wryly then admitted: “No, I didn’t.”

She sighed heavily. “You resisted the mother but daughter sure got you.”

“You might be onto something with the theory that she’s an ersatz for the opium. I feel… I’m acting like an addict. One look, one kind smile, one instance of her in danger and I’m reverting… as if nothing happened, as if she’s the only being in the world and I find myself lying down my life, my soul at her feet. Before you chide me again, I know… I’m well past any and all illusions where she’s concerned. I know she’ll never be so much as a friend let alone a second chance, a guiding star…. Yet I can’t help myself. She cost me everything, she tried to kill me… not directly of course… she would have felt as if she had descended from her high horse to stoop to my level. The crux of the matter remains… I don’t even yearn for a relationship with her now. I’m past that because I can’t even contemplate trusting her again. In my darkest hours I entertain horrible thoughts of revenge my better angels warn me I could never enact if only for the sake of not leaving Agnes motherless….”

“First of all, she’s a terrible mother. You’d be doing that child a favor. And second of all, you don’t love with half a heart… with anything less than your everything. I’ll give you that.”

He smiled sourly. “Have you thought about what you’re gonna do with the Post Office crew?”

“Lock them up and throw away the key? It’s not like I don’t have the necessary evidence.”

He chuckled. “Please! We both know you relish the idea of owning the FBI for the next eternity and a half.”

Her ice cold smile and calculated look reminded him instantly why the worst of the worst were afraid of her. “It does have its perks but the downside might just outweigh them. That task force is the equivalent of holding a grenade without its pin in your hand. It’s only a matter of time until you’re left without fingers.” She paused, her gaze softening as it met his. “Kenneth… they’re not pets! And they’re certainly not house broken. They’ve got claws and fangs and have developed a taste for human flesh… yours, to be more specific.”

He took a pen from the sleek, futuristic looking holder on her desk and snapped it clean into two. “Then let’s break them.”

Both her eyebrows shot up. “You’re serious?”

“As a heart-attack.”

“There’s my Day Manager.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s not him that we need right now but Raymond Reddington, not the one whose skeleton I burnt but the one I created, the one who made the entire criminal world tremble.”

“And that’s why you can never house break a wild beast. They’ll play fetch, roll over and eat out the palm of your hand but one day… when you least expect it... they’ll bite a limb off and run back into the woods where they belong.”

Red knew her metaphor didn’t encompass just him but the both of them. They were lions, major predators, top of the food chain. Even if he still wanted to, he could not protect Elizabeth or the task force. Maybe just maybe he could have kept them out of Admiral Wilkes’ clutches but he could never save them from him. He had played the good bad guy for so long for them, feeding them information, cleaning their messes, allowing them to use him as they pleased, killing anyone who so much as looked at them the wrong way, taking insults and petty cruelties in stride, that they had forgotten what he was and what he could do. Even when he had drawn a line for the rest of the task force, he had imposed no such thing on Elizabeth, grovelling at her feet like a well trained attack dog. But Liz had forgotten the first thing about Pit bulls: every now and then they tore their master apart with the same fangs they had used to bite on command. He got to his feet.

“You take Elizabeth for the obvious reasons,” he told her.

“You’ll stay out of it?”

Something tightened uncomfortably in his chest. “Yes.” Despite everything, he couldn’t bear the thought of her dead. Fortunately, taking out an FBI agent generally created too many complications and if it was one thing that Willy hated, it was complications.

“I won’t do it… or harm her in any way… physically, at least,” she said suddenly. “But not for the reason you think.”

He shot her a carefully blank look.

“I know it would be a gross exaggeration to call us friends but we do have a bond of sorts. I hate to see you hurt but Masha Rostova is a threat and she needs to be dealt with.”

He couldn’t argue with her there. He had seen first-hand the evidence of it. It was oddly touching, though, to have this legendarily fearsome woman protect him.

“Day Manager,” she called after him when he was at the door.

He turned to find her holding out to him a thick manila envelope.

“You can come home,” she said. “For real.”

“What’s that?”

“Open it.”

* * *

_Six Months Ago_

Red could feel the tension radiating off of Elizabeth, as she strolled into the Hillwood Gala on his arm. She was painfully beautiful, stunning even, obviously dressed to impress in a fiery red gown with an off-the-shoulder styling that revealed plenty of cleavage and a dangerously high leg slit. She wore no jewelry and Red regretted not knowing what she would wear. If he had, he would have bought her a pair of white sapphire chandelier earrings that would have gone marvelously with her attire. But then perhaps she would have refused them, he thought bitterly. The tension between them had changed upon her finding out he wasn’t really Raymond Reddington and switched to something more reminiscent of their early days interactions, taking on a volatile quality filled with a sharp edge of attraction. He could feel it even now, vibrating between them. He wondered if Elizabeth did too. It was enough to make him forget himself. Their old games were intoxicating. Lizzy was just on the tip of his tongue. Almost. The years, the cruelties and the betrayals still stood between them. Whenever he had her next to him, warm and alive, all he could think of was her cold, dead hand between his fingers.

“Why are we really here?” she asked suspiciously as he handed her a flute of champagne.

“To bring down a corrupt US senator who uses his position at the head of the Intelligence Committee to cover up the deeds of his friends both in the intelligence community and among less than savory private contractors so they would support his presidential ambitions,” he answered truthfully.

Elizabeth’s eyebrows twitched, doubt never leaving her eyes. She placed her untouched drink on a nearby table while Red drained his. “I fail to see how attending a society gala will help us with that.”

He leaned towards her so he could whisper in her ear without risking being overheard… and because he wanted a closer whiff of her scent. She wore no perfume. She merely smelled clean and headily like herself. Like fresh dew on a clear, crisp early April morning. He really needed to get a grip! “Evan Cranston is not a criminal you pick up off the street during a raid, Lizzy.” He realized his slip of tongue a moment too late. So much for getting a grip! “He’s skated without so much as a single suspicion tainting his immaculate reputation. We must first get a feel of his world, infiltrate it discreetly and from afar so he wouldn’t realize, observe who his friends are, what their weaknesses are, where his Achilles’ heel lies. When and only when we find out all this, we can afford to strike.” What is it his imagination or were there goosebumps on the skin of Elizabeth’s neck? “Which just so happens to allow us an evening to enjoy the hopefully lovely food and the Bollinger… and dance to the immortal _El Choclo_ they’ve just started to play.” He took no more than one step back and held out a hand to her.

Her face was less than accommodating but she did warily put his hand in his and permitted him to pull her in his arms, which he quickly tightened around her slim waist. He leaned to whisper in her ear again. “Skin white as now, lips red as blood, hair… brown as ripe chestnuts.”

“That’s not how the quote goes,” she protested.

“I didn’t mean Snow White. I meant you,” he replied smoothly as he was trying to maneuver her through the moves of the tango.

“This… this charm campaign of yours doesn’t work on me.”

“If anyone’s doing any charming tonight, Elizabeth, it’s you…. No, no, listen to the music, feel the notes, the rawness in the singer’s voice. In his inception, tango wasa way of walking. _Caminar_. Walking with elegance,” he instructed gently and let go of her waist to twirl her around. Her dress swooshed and moved exposing more of the porcelain skin of her leg. Red held her tighter when she returned in his arms. Suddenly he got a very vivid image in his head of the two of them kissing in the quiet darkness of the balcony. So potent was the mental picture that he almost missed a pair of familiar eyes making eye contact with him from across the room. Almost! He nodded back perceptively, acknowledging the silent confirmation relayed to him.

“Whose devil lips that know so well the art of lying do you have in mind tonight?” she asked quoting from the song playing around them. “Mine or yours?”

“I have never lied to you, Elizabeth,” he repeated, letting his exasperation color his voice. “Unlike you. When you might consider telling me at least one truth, perhaps I will let you in that secret that you’re dying to know without realizing just how dangerous it is.” He turned her around abruptly as the song ended.

She glared at him as the stood still amid the other couples who had already begun to dance to the next melody. Red wasn’t letting go of her and she made no effort to extricate herself from his grip. The effort of their dance had infused the creamy skin of her cheeks with rose. “I’ve already told you that excuse is wearing very thin.”

“You misunderstand me, Elizabeth. I’m not keeping this secret to protect you but for reasons that are mine and mine alone. Even I’m not that deluded to think I can protect you from this. If you find out the truth, nobody, not even me, can save you from it.”

* * *

Once the glittering lights of the gala were behind him, Red let himself shed his charming facade and allowed the deliberate monster inside to come to the fore. Charm was a weapon and he knew only one person besides himself who yielded it as well as he could. It was the same person who had taught him that. Right now, however, he required a different weapon, however. He found the gun where his associate had placed it. A small caliber Glock instead of his customary Browning that was harder to conceal and would have lead Elizabeth to suspect him. He fastened the silencer on the weapon.

He crept to the lonely arcade. Only one silhouette was visible in the moonlight. Red made a noise on purpose. Evan Cranston, chairman of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, turned. Red shot him in the face and then because he had missed twice with a shot to the head, also fired a few times more in the direction of the man’s chest. Cranston was as smart as he was ambitious and Scottie Hargrave had warned him about Red. Red had searched for weeks but found no other to cut through Cranston’s carefully crafted security than to trick the task force with a blacklist case that would aid him insinuate himself close to the many. If it was any consolation, everything he had told the FBI about Cranston being corrupt was entirely true.

Just like that he had deprived Scottie Hargrave of her most valuable ally on Capitol Hill.

* * *  
  


Jennifer’s eyes were red and swollen. She had obviously been crying. Red set down his book as she stormed in.

“Jennifer… is everything alright?”

“If I ask you to take me see my mother, will you?” she asked.

“Of course.”

She looked at him doubtfully as if she expected him not to. Red merely collected his coat and hat, draped the first over one arm and arranged the second on his head. He could easily divine the reason for Jennifer’s agitated suspicion: Elizabeth.

“Let’s go,” he said gesturing that she should pass through the door first.

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 100 bonus points if you figure out the inspiration for the opening scene. :)

**Author's Note:**

> Please, please, do not put spoilers for Season 6 in comments. Not everyone can see it at the same time as the US audience. Seriously, some even have to wait for it to come on Netflix. Be a good sport and don't ruin anyone's viewing experience. Do give feedback, though. Thank you very much.:-)
> 
> Thank you for reading. Please note that fanfic writers are only paid in comments and reviews.


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